Now You're Thinking with Real Science
by Jaywings
Summary: A former test subject, now free, takes up residence in a strange town where almost nothing is considered abnormal. A year later, a young paranormal enthusiast spots two astronomical anomalies orbiting the moon and immediately makes plans to bring them to Earth, firmly believing that the two metal spheres are alien in origin. Because, after all, what else could they possibly be?
1. The Man In the Moon

A/N: First off, I know I have way too many unfinished stories going. Many of them crossovers. And you're right, I really shouldn't be writing yet another one, but I couldn't get this out of my head. Secondly, yes... that's the best title I could come up with. I'm sorry. This is a crossover between Invader Zim and Portal, and I wanted to try to make this better than my other crossovers in that I want to do my best to explore all the major characters that make an appearance; their motivations and, most of all, their relationships.

That said, there will not be any pairings in this. There will also be no humanizations of robots and all the characters will retain their canon forms.

If you'd be willing to take the time to read and comment, any constructive criticism you might offer would be welcome :) I hope you like the story!

* * *

A single pinprick of light softened the muggy darkness down the road at the edge of town, expanding and growing brighter as it approached. It shone brighter than the other sources of light, the street lamps that were so dim one might wonder whether anyone had ever bothered to change the light bulbs after they had initially been installed who knew how many years ago. Up above and brighter by far than anything on the ground, the full moon hung in the sky like a glowing white lantern.

The traveling light became the winking headlamp of a dented, shuddering pick-up truck that emerged from the soupy night. It may, once, have been blue, and looked as if it shouldn't be able to stand on its four wheels—let alone drive. It crawled to the side of the road and jerked to a stop.

"This is as far outta my way as I can go," the stick-thin driver of said truck stated around a mouthful of gum. "You'll be okay?"

The woman sitting next to him gave a brief nod and awkwardly unbuckled her seatbelt around the large, cumbersome-looking box she held clutched in her lap. Before opening the door, she managed a grateful smile at the driver as a silent way of thanking him. The smile, stilted and pulling sideways, betrayed the fact that she wasn't used to doing it. He seemed to understand.

"No problem," he said with a dip of his head. "And good luck." He turned, peering out the driver-side window at the surrounding city. "I've heard _weird_ things about this town. Don't come here much. But…" He once again turned his gaze to the woman and cracked a grin of his own. "You seem like you've got a good head on your shoulders. You'll be fine."

The woman's mouth tightened (perhaps in another attempt at a smile) and she slid out of the car at last. The driver gave a slight wave before driving off once more, the truck's one remaining intact headlight flickering as if threatening to go out at any time. Any sign of the truck was swallowed up by the dark almost immediately.

The air was heavy and humid and felt almost suffocating when inhaled. The woman, with the strange cube still clasped to her chest… although the strain it produced due to its weight was obvious… straightened up and took in her surroundings with narrowed blue-gray eyes. Her long, dark hair, streaked with silvery gray in a few places despite her youth, was pulled back from her face in a sloppy ponytail. Her eyes were bright, focused, and contrasted completely with her gaunt, thin face. Physically, she looked underfed, and exhausted, as evidenced by the dark violet circles beneath her eyes. She looked _frail_, although if someone had told her that they likely would have woken up by the side of the road with a new lump on their head.

The strange orange jumpsuit and white tank top she wore were grubby and tattered while her stark white and black boots, with curved metal springs in the backs that kept her one perpetual tiptoe, were scuffed and discolored around the bottoms by all manner of chemicals and toxins. The cube she held was in even worse shape than she was. It may have been white at some point, or light gray, with pink hearts painted on each side. Now it was dirty, chipped and charred as if someone had left it in a fire.

Nevertheless, the woman's entire body radiated an air confidence. Anyone could tell from a mere glance that she was much stronger than she might appear and wouldn't hesitate to sustain that theory should the need arise.

From where she stood, just by the light of the street lamps sprinkled along the sidewalk and the overall feeling of _relief,_ she could tell that this town held no resonating echoes of That Place. None, unlike every other town she had passed through. The buildings here were blocky, unconventional, with circular portholes for windows, and just downright _ugly_ in appearance; nothing like the crisp ascetics of the test chambers she had been forced to navigate only days ago. Everything she could see was grungy and stained. The well-kept areas of That Place (when not overrun by nature) had always been pristine, sterile, and smelling faintly of chemicals. The woman found herself actually welcoming this new change, even though slight disgust at the state of the area rose up in her.

Her sharply-tuned ears picked up the sounds of the city—a city bustling with _people_. Other humans. Not robots, not AIs, _humans_. She closed her eyes and took in a deep breath through her nose. What she inhaled was smoggy and choking and with hints of the smell of greasy meat cooking somewhere. Her stomach churned a low growl and her eyes slid open again. First order of business: GET AWAY. Completed, for now. Second order of business: Find some source of food. Then she could find a place to stay for the rest of the night.

Before she could take a single step her eyes strayed to the sky and locked on the moon shining high above.

"_Oh, brilliant, yeah. Take one more look at your precious human moon. Because it cannot help you now!"_

The unbidden memory jarred her to the marrow and she gave a violent shudder. Her fingernails scraped against the cube and she gritted her teeth, _hard_, pain shooting through her gums. _No._ No, she couldn't let the memories affect her. She was free from that place, finally _free_… The one thing she had worked towards for _so long_, freedom—it was finally within her grasp, and she was going to seize it. That Place would haunt her forever. She knew that, accepted it, although she was by no means cheered by the idea. She would never forget the events that had taken place there, at the facility that contained all she had ever known. Remnants of it would follow her wherever she went. But now was a time for her to start over.

Of course, she wouldn't be able to do anything more tonight. Not with the full moon directly overhead, gazing down at the Earth with that apparent expression of dismay. She stared at it for a moment longer. _The man in the moon_, she mused, if only to distract her mind. Strange, how the splotches of craters on the white surface could take on the appearance of a face.

At last she tore her gaze away. Making sure to keep her back to the moon, taking in short breaths that had suddenly turned a bit shaky, she started toward the city and a new life.


	2. The Infinite Space

A/N: Updated this story pretty quickly because the first part was short and not much happened. Also, I forgot to mention, this doesn't take place in the Half Life universe. I really don't know anything about that.

* * *

~One year later~

A boy sat cross-legged on the scratchy grass of a hilltop. His short black hair, disheveled with a single lock arching over his head in the shape of a scythe, wafted in the breeze generated by a rickety metal fan standing by his side. A semicircle of metal laptop cases surrounded him with two or three to a stack. The case directly in front of him was propped open and he stared at the glowing screen in intense concentration. He prodded one of the buttons on the case's simplified keyboard; it made an unmistakable error sound and the boy slumped in disappointment.

"I was really hoping that would work," he muttered, rubbing his eyes under his large round glasses. "C'mon, this place has the biggest amount of concentrated magic for _miles_…"

The case, unsympathetic, gave no response. The boy closed it with a small sigh and placed it on top of one of the stacks.

He'd been trying for a couple of nights now to test out his collection of spelldrives at the top of Mystical Hill, with the thought that the magic saturating the air around the place might "soak" into the drives and provide one or two extra powerpoints (which were needed to cast the spells within). All right, so it was kind of a dumb idea. And so far? No luck whatsoever.

The boy, Dib, of course, leaned back on his palms and gazed at the spelldrives he hadn't tried yet. Each one held at least ten different spells, some of which he would do almost ANYTHING to be able to cast. Unfortunately each spell cost powerpoints… and every one of his spelldrives was completely out of them. The drives were still among his most prized possessions, though. Even when powerless, he found them awe-inspiring and… well, NEAT.

Of course it would be amazing if he _could_ cast spells. Hence his little excursions up here.

A slight draft ruffled the collar of his black trench coat and Dib closed his eyes, welcoming the feeling. This had to be the hottest July on record in this town. He wished he'd thought to bring water or something up here with him. The heat was beginning to make him thirsty.

"New 'moon satellites' update from NASAplace," a small, automated voice said. Almost disinterestedly Dib picked up the one real laptop sitting by his side and flipped it open, hammering in his password and clicking on the link for the update announcement.

'PICTURES RETRIEVED OF THE MOON'S STRANGE NEW SATELLITES!' the headline screamed—Dib wondered if all the capslock was necessary. Underneath the title was a short article regarding the same things NASAplace had been saying about the unorthodox moon events for months. There had been some sort of disruption on the moon's surface about a year ago… now there were reports about two strange objects revolving around it… same old, same old. Dib skimmed through the article, peering closely at the three pictures at the bottom. All of them were blurred and completely out of focus. Each one showed nothing but smears of blue, yellow, and gray circling the moon. Dib subconsciously compared what he could see of the smears to the variety of Irken tech he had encountered since first meeting the town's resident alien menace, Zim. No, anything built by Irkens was usually some shade of red or purple. Blue and yellow didn't match up. He saved each of the pictures to a folder on his desktop labeled "Moon Satellites."

As soon as he did that, something at the right of the article caught his eye—a short sound clip.

'UNKNOWN VOICES DISCOVERED ON STRANGE RADIO FREQUENCIES!' the small headline over the clip shouted. Dib raised an eyebrow. _This _was something different. Wishing he had thought to bring his headset, he cranked up the laptop's volume and hit play.

A barrage of crackle and static hissed from the speaker and set Dib's hair on end. In the midst of it, a male voice came through, faint but nearly discernible. _"…If- *static* -saw her. *static* -don't know if- *static* -look, mate, I'm trying to- *static* -Sorry. So- *static* -so, sorry."_ The voice had an obvious British accent. Was everyone in space British, or what?

That part of the recording was followed by a surge of interference so loud that Dib had to hastily turn down the laptop's audio for fear of burning out the speakers. At the very end of the recording, emerging from the static, a corrupt-sounding electronic call of _"—aaaAAAAACCCEEE!"_ rang out.

The recording came to an abrupt stop and Dib sat with no idea what to make of it. This wasn't the first time he had received a strange communication from outside the Earth's atmosphere. His stomach clenched as he realized what it reminded him of… that night, long ago now, when he had sat on his roof and picked up a faint and garbled transmission from somewhere far beyond the reaches of Earth's solar system. Only a few phrases had made it through, but Dib had known. _Known _that extraterrestrial beings were the source of the transmission, and that they _were_ going to come to Earth. Six months later and who should show up in Dib's class but Zim, the alien sporting the worst human disguise ever made but still managing to fool everyone into believing that he belonged in the classroom as much as anyone else.

_This _recording had originated much closer. Dib listened to it again, with the volume turned lower this time, and afterward saved the file directly onto his desktop. Strange moon satellites, perhaps having something to do with odd radio frequencies… That was a mystery he'd solve later.

Dib glanced up at the full moon hovering above before gathering up his spelldrives, laptop, and fan into the old wheelbarrow he used to cart all this stuff around. He wiped at his face and the back of his sweaty neck. The mosquitoes were awful tonight; he didn't really want to stay out on the hill much longer tonight. Besides, the whole "moon satellites" thing had been brought back to the forefront of his mind, and he wanted to try to catch a glimpse of them through his dad's giant telescope back home. With everything packed up again, he lifted up the back of the wheelbarrow and trundled back down the hillside.

Mystical Hill was about a mile or so away from Dib's house. He had never really gone there before until necessity had forced him into a desperate search for the cure to the Shadowhog Curse he had accidentally unleashed on his little sister, Gaz, a few months before. Now he came up here every once in a while to study the magic around the place and of course, more recently, to try to get his old spelldrives working.

Dib took the shortcut home, cutting through a few yards that he knew to be empty of fierce dogs and such. When at last he reached his house he punched in the code and scanned his hand to open the garage door, pushing the wheelbarrow inside and setting it down next to a bulky object the size of a small car and covered with a large white tarp. He snatched up his laptop from the top of the wheelbarrow, closed the garage door with a clatter, and hurried into the house.

The overpowering smell of grease and burnt crust met his nose the moment he stepped inside. He wrinkled it. "Gaz, did you order Bloaty's again?"

"They had a new special," came the curt reply. Dib dropped his laptop on the kitchen table and located the pizza box sitting wide open on the counter. He snatched two slices for himself.

"I still can't get the spelldrives to work," he said. "I just don't know how to get more powerpoints!"

Gaz's only response was a grunt. Dib figured she was in the living room.

He made the wise decision to just leave her to whatever she was doing and scarfed down his pizza, wiping off his fingers on a kitchen towel before heading to the backyard to use the telescope.

There was only one telescope (built by humans, anyway) in existence that was more powerful than the one in Dib's backyard, and that was the one in his father's own lab on the other side of town. Using this telescope to look at something as close and boring as the _moon_ was like trying to use a high-powered microscope to look at a particularly dull beachball. Dib hopped into the telescope's operating seat and entered the coordinates for the moon (he'd had them memorized since he was about three). The telescope responded immediately to his touch and whipped him to the side as it swung around to direct its lens at the moon. Dib switched on the manual controls and swept the entire telescope back and forth over the moon's surface, zooming in, zooming out. There was nothing. It was as empty as ever. He leaned back, drumming his fingers on the armrest. Had he really expected any different? His investigations _rarely_ yielded any actual evidence. And _this_ wasn't even a real investigation. This was an impromptu look through the telescope to see if he could catch a glimpse of some alleged moon satellites that may or may not be alien in origin.

_Wait!_ Dib spun the dial on the telescope, attempting to focus it, heart beating faster, _sure_ that he had seen some kind of movement at the edge of his vision. The image blurred. No matter how hard he tried, the telescope just would not focus clearly on something as close as the moon. It had been made to search out other galaxies on the far side of the _universe_. It was designed to find out just how infinite space actually was. And it was pretty close to doing that, too. How many celestial wonders had Professor Membrane discovered with his two prized telescopes? More than Dib could recall at the moment.

_And yet_, he couldn't help thinking bitterly, _Dad somehow _still_ can't see that aliens are out there._

Dib tried to recall just what he had seen through the lens. Any hints of blue or yellow? Or, for that matter, red or purple? He couldn't be sure. With a sigh, he scanned over the moon once more, then slipped back out of the chair. So much for that. At least he had a new Mysterious Mysteries episode tonight to look forward to.

* * *

Never before in his life had Wheatley experienced such utter SILENCE.

There had always been some sort of noise, whether the natural sort made by insects and birds (horrible things) or the living hum that had permeated the entirety of his former home, every nook and cranny, even while _She_ was inactive and lying broken in a pile of rubble. Even then the quiet had sometimes proved to be too much for him to handle, downright _maddening,_ but in those cases he had always been able to fall back on his own voice for a bit of noise. Just him, strolling (if he could be said to stroll) down his management rail, wittering away to himself about nothing in particular for want of someone else to talk to and to just keep from going bloody MAD.

Here, though. There was absolutely nothing. The noise… less… ness of it all pressed down on him like a blanket. He'd never imagined that the _absence_ of sound would be able to hurt his audio processors. It would be smothering if he had the ability to breathe. Of course, space was smothering in general. In an empty, not-being-able-to-breathe sort of way. That was kind of the point of it. One of the points, anyway.

He had never planned for this. Something like this happening, being launched into orbit around the bloody _moon... _it would never _ever_ have occurred to the little Wheatley who found the last living test subject and woke her from cryosleep so many ages ago, in a last-ditch effort to escape the dying facility and inevitable death. Back then it had been all he could do to stay alive, stay on his rail, and hold onto the futile but burning hope that one day he would make it to the open air Outside. Away from the monstrous, insane facility, and later, away from _Her_. How could he have possibly known that he'd end up in _space?_

Well, of course, he _was_ outside the facility now. So that was a plus. Stranded almost completely alone in the vast, empty, airless void of space, but Outside nonetheless. He'd spent a while debating to himself whether or not this was actually freedom. Not quite the freedom he'd been anticipating, but then, what _had_ he been anticipating? It wasn't as if he could walk, so even if he'd managed to escape and—_not thinking about that_, he rebuked himself.

He had to keep looking ahead. It was the present that mattered, not the past. His optic contracted slightly. _Concentrate on something else_. Like what? _I dunno. You're in space, mate. Look around._ His optic shields scraped over his eye in a squint and he took in his surroundings for the gazillionth time, trying in vain to find something new to see. That was another problem with space; the vast black emptiness got old rather quickly. He'd done his share of staring at both of the astronomical bodies he could see and neither of them had changed much in the duration of his exile up here. There was the little blue-and-white Earth, devastatingly far in the distance; there was also the craggy whitish surface of the moon, always miles and miles underneath Wheatley when he braved a glance down. The little points of light scattered across the entire backdrop of space—_stars, _his database told him—were even less interesting. His database seemed convinced that they had some quality that enthralled and captured the imaginations of humans but it baffled him that anyone could be so captivated by tiny lights in the sky.

There was also the brilliant and glaring ball of death that was the sun, far off over there, but after looking at it once and nearly having his optic and visual processors seared from the blinding brightness Wheatley had resolved never to make that mistake again.

Sometimes he replayed the events that had led to his current predicament, running them through his head in an effort to make proper sense of them. The scenes were edited, of course. He took one or two things out for important time-related reasons and stuck other bits in, namely some of his own dialogue that he wished he had said at the time. The scenarios he painted for himself were decidedly much more pleasant than the one he wished so much to forget. Maybe someday he'd figure out how to delete the real memories and replace them with the good, edited versions. Everything was made better with editing, wasn't it?

Of course, meddling with his own memory banks would probably kill him. At least, that's what the scientists had said.

With an effort Wheatley shook his casing to drag himself out of his reverie. He'd been floating in silent thought for too long again. If he kept this up, he'd fry his circuits!

[Doing okay over there, mate?] he asked his only companion, who was turning somersaults a small distance behind him. Sound may not work in space, but at least the seldom-used Aperture Science radios with which they were both equipped still did.

[I'm in SPACE!] came the loud, enthusiastic reply. Wheatley twitched involuntarily and blinked, his cracked, bright blue optic roving over to fix the other core with a weary look. That was pretty much all Spacey cared about, wasn't it, space. Space and him being in it. No wonder he was called the Space Core.

[Right. Just thought I'd, you know, ask,] Wheatley said. [Thought maybe you'd have some sort of update. Something like, "Look, Wheatley, over there! A rocket! Let's flag it down, quick-like, before it flies off!" In which case I'd look and, well, try to flag down the life-saving rocket. Somehow. Or you could do the classic, "AAAHH! I'm being attacked by a space monster! Run, mate! Save yourself!" which I have to admit I'm relieved you did _not_ say, because I can't actually run anywhere. Glad you're still enjoying space, though.] He gave a sigh that was both simulated and devoid of sound… a bit pointless, really. His next remark was a quiet, barely comprehensible murmur of, [At least one of us got what they wanted.]

[YOU SAID SPACE,] the other core agreed.

Wheatley looked away. […How long have been up here, do you think?] He wasn't sure why he had asked. He didn't want to know. Not like Spacey would answer him, anyway—

[ONE YEAR THREE DAYS FOUR HOURS SEVENTEEN MINUTES,] the Space Core said, catching Wheatley completely by surprise.

[Oh! Didn't… didn't know you were actually keeping track,] he choked. A _year?_ A year. Without even knowing it, they'd passed the anniversary of his expulsion from the facility. _The anniversary of your own death_, a snide little part of him said. Wheatley scowled and said over the radio, [Really? Well, guess what, haha, I'm not dead! So you're wrong, there.]

_You might as well be dead_, the voice replied, and Wheatley found he had nothing to say to that. [Why have you been keeping track of how long we've been out here, anyway?] he asked Spacey instead.

[We're in SPAAAAAACCCCEEEE!] the other core cheered, his yellow optic spinning in his chassis. Wheatley gave up trying to get any coherent response out of him.

But that didn't stop him from voicing his own thoughts aloud (or over the radio, anyway). Even if the Space Core had stopped listening.

* * *

It was long past midnight and half the city was asleep. Gaz had probably turned in long ago and was likely continuing one of her video games in bed.

Dib, however, sat on the roof of the house with his usual equipment—laptop, headset, and wide-receiving satellite dish. All the tools he needed in an attempt to trace a strange transmission found on a stray radio frequency. He couldn't shove aside the feeling that Zim had something to do with it. Zim, the Irken invader bent on dominating the Earth; Zim, who had somehow managed to fit himself almost seamlessly into society and pass himself off as human to everyone but Dib and Gaz… he had been _far_ too quiet lately. Doing something to the moon as part of some madcap plot to conquer Earth sounded exactly like the sort of thing Zim might do.

Dib twisted a dial on the console of the satellite dish, wiping his brow with the sleeve of his other arm. His shirt clung to his skin and his hair now stuck to his forehead in clumps. _Maybe I should have taken my coat off._

_Actually, maybe I should quit for the night_. He leaned back on his heels. It really was getting late. A little white dot on the console pulsed slowly as the signal traveled around, searching for the frequency that NASAplace had found. A nagging thought at the back of his mind insisted that he wouldn't find anything, but he hated the idea of giving up.

A sudden crackling filled the speakers on the laptop and a single voice came through. _"Just thought I'd- *static* -flag it down, quick-like, before it- *static* -save yourse-!*static* -have we been up here, do you-?"_

Dib nearly fell over backwards. "That's the same voice as in the recording!" he exclaimed. "I found the signal! Computer, trace it!"

"Signal originated approximately twenty-two miles above the surface of the moon," Dib's laptop responded promptly.

"And is there any way to tell what that _is_ up there?" Dib asked.

"No. Subject is unknown."

Dib lowered his headset down around his neck and kept his gaze locked on the moon high above. _Something_ was up there, something that was unregistered by NASAplace. And if that _something_ had been put up there by Zim it could hardly be benevolent. He had to do something and he just about knew what.

* * *

Only his plan was shot to pieces as soon as he made it to the garage, threw off the white tarp, and took in the sight of the spaceship that awaited him underneath. The dark red and purple ship, formerly belonging to yet another Irken who had attempted to conquer Earth, had crashed, driverless, into Dib's backyard several months ago. He had been attempting (mostly unsuccessfully) to get it in working order again. Just this past Christmas, Gaz had actually fixed it up enough to fly. Dib had hoped to use it to get to the moon.

However, he could tell immediately that, although the ship could fly now, trying to travel in space with it would likely do it in. It still needed too many repairs. He sighed, took another wistful glance at the ship, and closed the garage door. He'd have to try something else.

Dib's face was suddenly split by a huge yawn and he rubbed at his eyes under his glasses, weariness dragging at his bones. He stumbled to the stairs and trudged up them, wondering vaguely where this unexpected fatigue had come from. Anyway, he couldn't do anything more tonight. He'd have to wait until tomorrow to figure out what to do about the moon satellites.


	3. The Retrieval

_Drip._

_Drip._

_Drip._

_Drip._

Amidst the sounds approximating a leaky faucet there was the squeak of pistons and the clatter of metal against metal, loud footsteps echoing in the cavernous room. The source of the noises stopped short next to the white-paneled wall, stooping down on spindly-looking but incredibly strong legs sculpted from white metal. A small, glowing orange optic peered down, the black pupil in its center contracting at the sight of a sickly yellow-brown substance dribbling from a crack near the floor.

The robot stood quickly, voicing its displeasure in a high-pitched gurgle. A second robot trotted up, its deep blue optic flicking from its orange-eyed companion to the trickling substance. This robot was much shorter than the other, squatter, and its midsection was spherical rather than elongated like its companion's. The robot looked at its comrade, let out a soft sound that may have been a scoff, and knelt, reaching a metallic finger toward the stuff.

"_Do be sure to mind the acid leaking into some test chambers_," the familiar Voice said with a preceding _beep_, its feminine tone measured and level. It came from everywhere at once and resonated around the robots like a physical force. "_Some damage caused by long-ago catastrophic events has proven to still be nearly irreversible. Oh, don't worry. I _will_ fix it. But it will take more time, and unless the leak seems to be part of the test, it would be in your best interests to simply ignore it. It is still acid. And Blue, if you touch it, your hand will likely disintegrate. And then how will you complete the test?_"

The blue-eyed robot snatched back its hand with a series of apologetic chatters and stood up once more. The orange-eyed robot grabbed Blue's thick four-fingered hand in its own slim three-fingered one, turning it over as if assessing for damage. Blue pulled its hand back from the other robot and pointed across the room, at a shimmering blue bridge spanning the distance between two walls high above the ground. The orange-eyed robot looked in that direction and understood immediately; lacking the components to actually nod, it blinked and gave a clumsy thumbs-up. Together, running in perfect, fluid pace with each other, the two partners raced in the direction of the bridge.

As they ran, the leaking, cracked panel retracted into the wall with a splash of acid and vanished to be replaced by another one.

* * *

Far above the room where two android-like robotic constructs ran helter-skelter in an attempt to solve the latest test, the Central AI chamber was still and quiet. But not quite silent. The facility was never completely silent, not even when its mistress had been offline, scattered on the ground, ruined, _dead_. There was always the background hum of the place, the buzz of life within its walls, the occasional voice warbling through the decrepit halls and addressing no one but itself, perhaps a stray "Sentry mode activated," and then quiet once again.

The master of the facility, its mistress, The Boss, kept Her attention riveted on the progress of the two robots, barely moving in Her ceiling mount. Her senses branched out over the entire facility, tuned for any anomalies, any unauthorized movement or access. But still She was most focused on Her two test subjects. Her two perfect, idiotic little test subjects. They never did learn, did they? A year of testing, endless testing, most of the tests utilizing that very same acid as a discouraging consequence for contact with the floor, and yet Blue had been about to touch the stuff anyway. Disgraceful. Perhaps next time She wouldn't warn them. It may be interesting to watch them attempt to solve a test with one or two missing limbs.

On the plus side, there was very little work left to do on repairing the facility. _Her_ facility, once so beautiful, now having had to be almost completely rebuilt from the shambles _that little idiot_ had left it in. Every day She found new areas he had destroyed or tainted with that diseased little mind of his. How he had even managed to bring the facility to such complete ruin in the space of about thirty-six hours, to the point where it had taken a year for Her to bring it back to its former glory, She had _no_ idea. She might have been impressed at the feat, if She had had the capacity to be impressed with someone who had very nearly pulverized the one thing She cared about.

She discarded the stray thoughts and turned to more important matters. No use dwelling on any of that, after all. The moron was gone for good, the facility was nearly rebuilt (_once again_), and now was the time for testing.

There was Science to be done.

* * *

Dib arrived downstairs the next morning to be greeted by an unusual sight. His father, Professor Membrane, was sitting at the breakfast table sipping a steaming mug of coffee. He was somehow managing to drink it without disturbing his tinted goggles or the high collar of his labcoat, both of which he wore at all times. Dib halted in the doorway. "…_Dad?_"

"Hello, Son!" Membrane said in his usual jovial, booming voice, and set down his mug. "Just stopped in to check on one of my experiments, and for a cup of coffee! I'll be on my way in a minute."

Dib had caught him just in time, then. He hurried into the kitchen, sliding into the chair across the table from his father and facing him with an earnest expression. "Dad, I have a question."

Membrane had been about to get up but at that he whirled around, suddenly giving his son his full attention. "Does it have to do with REAL SCIENCE?"

"Um… sort of." Dib averted his eyes for a moment and then looked back. "Is there any way to catch some strange objects orbiting the moon and bring them to Earth?"

Professor Membrane sat back down and stared off at nothing in particular, tapping one finger of his gloved right hand against his mug. "Hmm… Why so close? Scientific study stopped bothering with the moon _decades_ ago! …This isn't for your parascience, is it?"

Dib's eyes narrowed in annoyance. "_Dad_, it's not called parascience, although… I guess that _is _kind of a cool name. But paranormal study is a legitimate science and—" He trailed off, realizing that he was branching into the old futile argument he had made countless times before and which his father never listened to. "…These things orbiting the moon aren't registered by NASAplace, Dad. I just want to know what they are!"

His father seemed to smile, but really it was impossible to tell with the majority of his face covered. "That's the spirit, Son! As long as your interest is purely scientific, I'm sure I can help you with your moon research!"

Dib gave him a sort of half-smile. "Moon research" wasn't exactly what he was after, but he'd take any help his dad could offer.

"Now," Membrane continued. "I _have_ told you, no excursions into space until you're thirteen." Dib shifted somewhat uneasily in his chair at this. "There _are_ ways of using something to lock onto celestial objects and then act as a gravitational device, drawing the object to Earth! The easiest way to do this would be, of course, by using PEG."

"The Perpetual Energy Generator?" Dib perked up.

His father raised an eyebrow at him. "I shut it down, Son! Under no circumstances are you to set foot there until you're fifteen! I'll have to review my notes. I'm sure I can find something else to solve your problem in as little as…" He paused, thinking. "Five months. Well, now, I need to be going!" He drained the rest of his coffee mug and put it in the sink. "Have fun, Son, don't steal, and remember to feed the puppy. And greet your sister for me!" Without a backwards glance, he left the kitchen. Seconds later Dib heard the front door open and close. He sighed. His dad still hadn't noticed that their old pet had disappeared years ago.

Dib got up from the kitchen table, went into the living room, and hopped onto the couch, flipping open his laptop and doing a websearch for information on his dad's Perpetual Energy Generator. Despite the number of links he clicked on, there really wasn't much information to be found. His dad evidently didn't want people messing with it. Well, considering that a malfunction in the generator could send out a Wave of Doom that would wipe out all life on the planet, that wasn't actually too surprising. There were no instructions for how to use it. He'd have to figure that out when he got there—and he _was_ going, because he wasn't waiting around for five months or more for a different solution to present itself—and there wasn't even a map to show where the generator was.

Giving up on the websearch, he closed the laptop again and stood up. Gaz entered the room, her purplish hair slightly mussed from sleep and her eyes squinted nearly closed like always.

"Dad's left already?" she asked in a bored tone.

Dib nodded, not bothering to ask how she knew he'd even been home. "He said to tell you 'hi.'" Gaz's only response was to grunt as she headed into the kitchen, pouring herself what sounded like a bowl of cereal. Dib slid his laptop into his backpack. "Hey, Gaz. Remember PEG?"

"Yeah," Gaz replied, "mostly because that's when you went completely crazy."

Dib let out a breath through his nose. "That was a robot."

"I know," Gaz said. Dib could hear the smirk in her voice.

"Okay, forget that. Do you remember how to get there?"

His sister came back into the room, carrying a bowl of FrankenChokies and shrugging her shoulders. "Yeah, I guess. Maybe I'll tell you if you promise to stop _bothering_ me."

* * *

He waited until dark to make the trip to the generator in an effort to avoid being observed, and because the objects he was after were orbiting the moon (which was obviously more easily seen at night). The day only grew hotter and that night was even muggier than the last. Every slight breeze was a welcome reprieve from the hot sticky mess that the boy felt he was wallowing into. He paused and raised his face into the wind, letting it tickle his sweaty neck and rustle the collar of the black trench coat he had _still_ neglected to take off. In front of him, along with a small flashlight clutched in his hand, he pushed the same rickety wheelbarrow that he had used on his previous trip to Mystical Hill. This time it contained only a fire extinguisher, his laptop (since he'd known it would just be way too hot to wear his backpack), the headset to go with his laptop, and… a pair of oven mitts. They were blue and printed with 'Probing the Membrane of Science' in blocky white letters—part of the show's line of kitchen implements. Professor Membrane never cooked so Dib assumed the oven mitts had been in their kitchen purely for appearances, but they functioned well enough. They'd even been infused with nanobots that blocked the heat even better and provided more protection. Although there was no telling what the nanobots themselves did to your hands.

If anyone took notice of the boy traipsing through town after hours with an old wheelbarrow holding an odd assortment of items, they made no mention of it. Maybe they were used to that sort of thing by now. After all, it was _Dib_.

He followed Gaz's directions to the letter and at last reached the generator. Dib paused for a moment, gazing at it under the light of his flashlight beam. He'd never actually been here before. PEG looked different than what he had seen on his laptop screen from the eyes of his robotic facsimile, back when the generator had first been opened. That time there had been an enormous glass dome covering a metallic hemisphere and an array of metal tubes. Now that was gone and the generator resembled a large, dark gray bunker of some sort.

The entire thing was surrounded by a chainlink fence with barbed wire at the top and, of course, a padlocked gate. Dib took hold of the padlock and looked it over. His heart sank. He hadn't thought about the possibility of the generator being locked up. His mind immediately flicked to breaking and entering. Technically illegal, but… his dad _owned_ this place. And it wasn't as if he was planning on stealing anything. Anything made by humans and currently on Earth, anyway.

With his tongue poking out between his teeth, he reached in his pocket and pulled out the lockpick he'd started carrying for just such an occurrence as this. He had never used it before and it took nearly ten minutes before the padlock opened with a soft _click_ and fell to the ground. The gate, with barely a creak, swung open almost of its own accord. Dib dropped the lockpick back in his pocket, hitched up the wheelbarrow again, and pushed his way inside.

The enormous structure loomed in front of him, silent but for the shrill _screet!_ of crickets nearby. He examined every side of the generator for some sort of control panel. There _needed_ to be a way to control this thing. Where was it?

It took him almost a complete revolution around the generator, trundling his wheelbarrow along as he went, before he finally came to the front of the structure and discovered a cylindrical control tower in the corner. Dib dropped the wheelbarrow, picked up his laptop, and stepped over to the door leading into the tower.

Back when Dib had first had to deal with this generator, there had been a door leading to the Generator Core with a surveillance camera protruding from the wall next to it. Unsurprisingly, this door was no different. The camera winked a light as Dib came into its frame of view. He looked up at it, allowing it to scan his face to verify that he was related to Professor Membrane. With a _ding_, the door opened and Dib stepped inside the tower.

It was cramped and utterly bare inside. He jumped as the door swung closed behind him. The floor he was standing on shuddered for a moment before slowly beginning to rise. Dib hugged his laptop to himself, face pointing up at the opening at the top of the tower. When it reached the top, the floor came to a stop with Dib standing in the center of a console, a ring of controls with a single computer screen.

A slight shiver passed through his body but he shoved it to the side. Now came the difficult part… figuring out exactly how to set this thing up to grab two tiny objects in a gravitational field of some sort and bring them to Earth. The controls weren't even labeled.

After a quick examination of the various controls, Dib ducked down, sitting cross-legged on the metal floor and opening his laptop. "Computer, pull up all the files you have on the Perpetual Energy Generator."

A few documents and pages of short snippets of code obediently popped up on the screen. Dib read through what he could but didn't find much of interest. Basically all he learned was how to turn on the control panel lights. He went ahead and did that, allowing the little cylindrical console area to be flooded with light.

With the place lit up Dib turned off the flashlight and a single blue button on the control panel caught his eye. Investigating it, his heart skipped a beat at the fact that it _was_ labeled, and said, quite clearly, 'Gravity Field Towing Mechanism.'

Dib blinked. Wow. It was kind of impressive how often he was able to easily miss really important and kind of obvious things. A bit sheepishly, he hit the button.

The entire complex shook as the top of the bunker opened and a massive dome rose from the depths of it. It grew larger and larger, towering high above the ground and not stopping until it was taller than almost every other building in the city. Dib gaped.

Words appeared on the console's computer screen: 'Input coordinates.'

Dib's laptop was still tracing the coordinates from the staticky radio signal put out by the moon satellites. He quickly punched those in and hit enter.

'Coordinates entered. Processing… processing… target locked. Target count: 02. Begin retrieval? y/n'

He hesitated for a moment. As far as he knew, PEG had never been used this way before. And, according to his father, this thing _was _capable of sending out a planet-scale Wave of Doom. Heck, he himself had even believed that it had malfunctioned and opened a spinning portal to the past! But there was no other way to capture the space probes. Not unless he wanted to wait months for his dad to figure out another solution.

He jabbed his thumb down on the _Y_ button, took up his laptop again just as the generator began to roar, and smacked the button that lowered the floor back to the ground.

'Commencing retrieval!' the computer screen read. 'Thank you for using the Perpetual Energy Generator! Have a good day/night...' The floor began moving down and the very last word on the screen went without his notice. '...Dib.'

When the floor stopped he dashed out of the control tower and slammed the door behind him.

The night sky remained unchanged. A dark, sweeping canvas sprinkled with glittering stars and a single silver orb, but no sign of space objects being pulled to Earth. Dib bit his lip. _I need to get to higher ground. _He ran over to the other side of the generator where the door to the Generator Core was housed and, locating a rough ladder welded to the side of it, scaled it quickly and settled down at the top. He locked his gaze on the moon and prepared to wait.

* * *

Wheatley didn't notice the tugging sensation until he crashed headlong into the Space Core, who had at some point drifted into a wider orbit than him and ended up a bit of a distance away.

[_Oomph!_ …Sorry, mate.]

[You aren't an asteroid,] the space-obsessed core replied.

[Er, no. Not quite. You're right on that one.] Wheatley blinked, wincing as his optic shields scraped a small clump of grit over the crack in his optic. He didn't even have a _reason_ to blink. Why did he keep doing it? It was just _painful_.

His hull twitched as his circuits glitched again. He swiveled around to face his one companion and said, more just to make conversation than anything else, [Look, I know I've asked you this before and you've never properly responded, but what exactly _is_ it about space that fascinates you so mu—] He stopped, quite suddenly. [Do… do you feel that? A sort of… pulling? Like we're being pulled. Quite fast, actually, um, that's alarming. Bit unusual for space_do you feel that?_]

[Gravity! GRAVITY IN SPACE,] the other core cheered.

[_What?_ Oh, bloody—] Wheatley whirled around, fully expecting to see the craggy lunar surface rushing up to meet him. Instead it seemed to be a greater distance away than it had before. [Does that look farther away to you? Okay we are _definitely_ moving. Fast. _Away_ from the moon. And away from the moon is… EARTH! D'you know what this means?!]

[Leaving the moon. Bored of the moon. Wanna see more space. Stars. Galaxies. Meet the sun.]

Wheatley turned to the Space Core with a perplexed look. [Um… you do know you wouldn't _actually _want to meet the sun, right? It's… it's like the incinerator, mate. Only worse, as far as I know. I mean, look at it. It looks bloody _scalding_.]

[Gonna meet the sun!]

[All right!] Wheatley rolled his optic. [If you want to! I'm not stopping you. Maybe the sun's not actually all that bad. Wouldn't count on it, though. Anyway… look!] He turned his gaze fully on the little blue planet they were approaching. [The Earth's getting closer, it's getting _closer!_ We're going bloody home! We're going… _really_ fast.]

[GONNA SEE THE ATMOSPHERE.]

[The atmosphere?] Wheatley repeated without comprehension. [We're going through the—?]

Realization hit him like a falling Weighted Storage Cube and he flailed his handles in a futile attempt to slow his descent. [AH WAIT NONONONONO NO! No, I've changed my mind! I don't want to go back this way, actually! The moon was fine. Absolutely fine! Miss it already. In fact, I'd like to go back to it! Don't… why are we… _ohno_.] He convulsed as a horrifying thought struck him. [It's… it's _Her_, isn't it. She's found us. Yes. She's found us and now She wants to exact some horrible revenge or torture on us—well, on me—oh… should've… should've seen this coming.]

He pulled himself into his casing and slammed his optic closed, huddling both handles into his face to make himself as small as possible. [Burning up in the atmosphere is probably far better than being captured by _Her_, actually. For me. You don't have to worry about Her. You never… invoked Her WRATH.] He cracked his optic shutters open a fraction. [Always wanted to say that! Oh, but, not the time. Not the time.] He turned to address the Space Core again. [If I were you, mate, I'd try really hard _not_ to be melted in the atmosphere. You might still stand a chance. With Her. With Her… not killing or torturing you in gruesome ways.] His optic widened. [Oh! Hang about, maybe she'll accept an apology! …No… doubt it. She likes Her revenge. Face it, I'm done for. I'm done for and there's nothing I can do about it.]

[Space!]

Wheatley nodded. [Brave last words, mate. Er, word.] At this, a small flare of hope rekindled in his processor. [Oh! Last words! Yes… I'd like some of them. Very much so. Better, uh, make 'em good. Y'know, very last words and all. What I'll be remembered for.] He sighed, casting his optic downward. [Not… not that anyone but you can hear me now.]

They were advancing toward Earth faster. Wheatley's optic jerked, a bit of bright blue shining out from between two extremely narrowed shutters. He was so preoccupied with his own ramblings and the Earth growing closer with every second that he didn't notice the shimmering purple light that had sprung into existence around the two cores.

[Right… last words. Well, there's you.] Wheatley opened his optic a bit more and rotated it toward the Space Core, who looked out-of-his-mind ecstatic about their current predicament. [I actually am glad you were here, even with all your droning space talk—no offense—because without someone to talk to I'd probably have gone absolutely mad ages ago. I doubt you actually listen to a word I say but it's good to have someone around all the same.]

Wheatley gave a simulated cough and turned away. [Now… as for _Her_. I'll go ahead and say it. Stuffing Her into a potato was a _bit_ uncalled for, I'll be honest. She doesn't mind throwing insults about all willy-nilly, no, not a care in the world, but c'mon I mean who _really_ deserves to be stuck in the body of a potato, right? No one, that's who. And if that had gone unchecked then the potato would've rotted around her, probably. Nasty. Well, I mean, the others hadn't gone rotten, although there was a _lemon_ battery that looked quite a bit furry. Probably got some horrible disease brewing in there. Small wonder the entire facility wasn't toxic, just from that lemon. And… and from all the acid and neurotoxin and whatever else She's got stored up in there, can't believe that hasn't leaked out yet.] He paused. [Now, back to Her. I admit it. I should not have turned her into a potato. And for telling the… the truth, no less! I assume. As she knew it, anyway. Maybe I _was _designed as an… "Intelligence Dampening Sphere," like She said, but obviously I've gone far past my programming and become quite brilliant, if I do say so myself. I… _arrrggggh,_ who am I _KIDDING?_]

Wheatley shook himself violently and his voice, heard only over the radio, cracked. [Who am I trying to fool? Who am I honestly, _honestly_ trying to fool? I…] He glanced at the Space Core, happily babbling on about nebulas or some such thing. There was no one else who could hear him and Spacey wasn't even listening. [I…] He closed his optic tightly again. [I… _am_ a… moron. There, I said it. I am a moron. I'm a moron, an idiotic moron built to make mistakes and if I did go past my programming it was to make even bigger mistakes than anyone ever thought I'd be able to make. Way to go me. And I never shut up, either, look at me. You're not listening to a word I'm saying. Yep, it's going in one ear and _out_ the other. I might as well not even be talking and I can't stop, so… so…]

He screwed up his optic, glaring down at the planet where he would meet his imminent demise. [I'M SORRY! I'm SORRY!] He whirled to face the Space Core, his optic still pulled into an expression of pure agony. [I'm sorry for expecting you to listen when all you want to talk about is space.] He turned again to face the Earth. [I'm sorry for shoving you into a potato and nearly letting the facility explode. I'm…]

His voice shook and he averted his gaze completely, staring off into the velvety blackness of space instead as his mind turned to someone he had managed to avoid thinking about thus far. [I'm sorry, lady, for stabbing you in the back. For punching you down an elevator shaft. For making you test when you thought you were _done_ with testing. For trying to kill you, for the insults, for making you hate me. And… I really hoped you'd forgive me, if we ever met again. Not likely now. And if I did somehow survive this, again, not likely seeing as we're in the atmosphere now and still hurtling toward the extremely solid-looking ground, you wouldn't forgive me anyway. Not after what I've done. No, you're stuck with _Her_—same as I'll be if I survive—testing, testing for the rest of your life, and this time there's no little blue core to break you out of a test chamber, is there. Because I'll be dead. Or, well, tortured until I'm dead.]

The purple light around the two cores, still unnoticed by either of them, solidified slightly to become a sort of shield against the heat of reentry. It only half-worked. Although neither core reached critical temperatures, Wheatley could feel his circuits beginning to overheat as they plunged deeper into the atmosphere.

[Still,] he mused, [in my last moments of life and… and freedom, if you want to call it that, I'd… like to think that you forgive me. Please. I know, I'll pretend that you can hear me right now, and I'll apologize again. And then the little You in my head will forgive me right off. Not just because you have brain damage, probably, but because… we were _friends_ once, weren't we? Proper friends. And friends forgive each other, I think, when the apology is sincere. Mine certainly is. Better hurry this up, we're coming in _pretty_ fast now. I… So, I… just wanted to say…]

The radio became choked with static. Wheatley's optic cracked open again and he drew in a deep, simulated breath as if getting ready to shout.

Then, in a heavy voice straining against the tears he couldn't shed, the sound slow and faint in the thin air, he said, "I just wanted to say… I _am_ a moron, and… I'm… _Sorry!_"

The heat became too much for him to bear in his current state. Wheatley's voice synthesizer crackled, his casing rattled, and his optic died to a dull black as each of his sensors clicked off one by one.

But before the world around him died completely, the lady test subject pictured in his mind's eye, dressed in a clean jumpsuit of bright white and orange and toting a polished and gleaming portal device, nodded her forgiveness.

Wheatley shivered and a single conscious thought floated to the forefront of his processor.

_Thank you_.


	4. Incoming Robo-Balls of Doom

A/N: Quick word about the chapter titles… I figured that since this is a crossover between IZ and Portal, I'd switch between naming some chapters sort of in the style of the more dignified Portal 2 chapter titles, and naming other chapters in the more chaotic/undignified style of Invader Zim episode titles. Because I can.

* * *

The bright light in the sky was so small at first that Dib took it for just another star. He sat with his hands wrapped around his knees and his laptop propped open beside him, still gazing out at the night sky. The PEG generator buzzed and hummed around him like a living creature as it worked to bring the two spheres in from space but he had grown used to it by now. He let out a small sigh through his nose. This was taking longer than he'd thought… much longer.

Above, the speck of light grew larger and larger and finally split in two. Dib's head jerked up, his eyes locking on the spots and his heart beating more quickly. That was it! That _had _to be it. He jumped to his feet and snapped the laptop closed, pressing it against his chest. He could make out two little orbs now. They seemed to be gaining speed as they zipped toward the generator.

_Wait_. If they were coming to the _generator_, which made sense, then that meant they were speeding right toward…

With a yelp Dib plunged off the side of the bunker-type wing of the generator he'd been waiting on, not bother to try to locate the ladder that he had used earlier. He attempted a roll as he hit the ground to absorb the impact but his legs were jarred nonetheless and his hands, thrown out to catch himself, skidded on the pavement and the skin of his palms split. The laptop clattered to the ground next to him and Dib, gasping, tried to crawl away before just curling up and covering his head protectively with his arms.

A mere second after Dib had launched himself off the side, one of the orbs crashed into the enormous glass dome covering the main part of the generator, bounced off, and plowed into the top of the bunker just where he had been standing. It came to a rest there, spewing up a horrendous crackle of sparks and flames.

The second orb sail over Dib's head and smashed into the pavement several feet away with a terrible _crunch_, burrowing into the ground and forming a shallow crater. Rubble rained down on him and it was not until a moment after both spheres were still that he lowered his arms, blinking.

The night was eerily silent after the racket created by the spheres ceased. Dib slowly uncurled himself and stood up, wiping his stinging palms on his pants and only dimly realizing that the hum of the generator had shut off.

His heart sank at the sight of what he had done. Both spheres had crashed at high speeds. How could they possibly have survived _that? _Now… he'd _never_ know what they actually were. He sighed, half turning away. _Maybe I _should've_ waited five months…_

"SPAAAAAACE!"

Dib jumped about a mile at the unexpected noise.

"Space! Where'd you go. Where'd you go. Where'd space go? Back on Earth. Yay! Bring back space. Space. Wanna see Jupiter. Wanna meet the sun."

He pinpointed the voice, electronic and processed-sounding, as coming from the sphere that had collided with the ground. The other sphere, the one that had hit PEG, had so far made no sound. Cautiously he stepped over to the sphere that had spoken.

It was, obviously, spherical in shape, with two metal handlebars protruding from the top and bottom on one side. Its mechanics whirred and creaked as a circular part in its center, made up of glowing yellow streaks like an iris spanning from a black circle in the middle, flicked to face him. It looked, for all intents and purposes, like an eye.

Two metal shutters closed over the yellow circle and opened again, giving Dib the distinct impression that this globoid robot-thing had just blinked at him.

"Space," it said again.

"Oh," Dib said awkwardly. He stared. He should've been overjoyed. He'd pulled this thing from space… and it was still functioning! He'd nearly given up, but here it was. And maybe the other one was still working, too! "Um, wait right here."

The sphere gave no acknowledgement that it had heard or understood him. Dib retreated back to his wheelbarrow, picking up his laptop off the ground along the way and making a mental note to check it for damage later. He traded his laptop for the contents of the wheelbarrow: the fire extinguisher and the oven mitts, bringing the items back over to the yellow-eyed sphere.

"Ba ba baba ba bababa," it was saying, its "eye" veering wildly in every direction. Dib wondered if the crash had knocked a few of its circuits loose. He leveled the nozzle of the fire extinguisher at it, spraying it a few times until the sphere was engulfed in a gray cloud of powder that dissipated quickly. Donning the oven mitts, he then gingerly picked up the sphere by its handles. Not a shred of heat made it through the mitts, for which he was grateful.

"Hey! Are we going back to space?" the sphere babbled. "Are you going to take me back to space?"

Dib tipped his head to the side, examining the strange little sphere. "Are you… _sentient?_" he asked.

The sphere bobbed its "face" up and down. "Yep. Yep. She'd say yep. SPACE CORE! That's me. Space. I'm the best at space. Mmmm…. put me back in space?"

Space Core. So these things were called "cores," then?

"What about the other one?" Dib jerked his head to where the other one had crashed. "Is that one sentient, too?"

"My space buddy. Don't know. He says sorry. In space." The "Space Core" then appeared to lose any semblance of lucidity it had had and began rambling incoherently about space jail or something.

His thoughts whirling, Dib brought the core over to his wheelbarrow and set it inside next to his laptop. Once he was sure that the core was secure he picked up the fire extinguisher again, still wearing the oven mitts, and looked up at the top of the generator's flat structure where the other core had landed. Oh, great. He cast a doubtful look at the ladder. Well… he couldn't just leave that core up there, could he?

Resigning himself, he tucked the extinguisher under his arm as best he could and clumsily scaled the ladder.

When he climbed over the top a wave of heat hit him and he flinched. He located the core, smoldering a few feet away behind one of the generator's ventilation shafts. It was completely immobile and silent. The area of the roof where it had hit was charred, scuffed, and dented, as was the core itself. A few flames licked from its sides.

Dib sprayed the fire extinguisher at the core until the fire died completely. When the gray fog of powder settled he dropped the extinguisher back over the side of the generator for want of something better to do with it. It hit the ground with a _clunk_ but luckily didn't, well, explode or anything. Dib adjusted the oven mitts on his hands before hefting the core up by its handles and inspecting it. It was pretty much identical to the other one, except it looked like a train wreck by comparison. If Dib had to guess, he would've said that this thing had been through a _war_. There wasn't a spot on it that wasn't scratched, dented, or blackened from heat. The metal shutters over its eye were shut tight and the spherical body swung freely on the handles. It was dead.

Or broken, anyway. It was kind of heavy, too; fifteen pounds, at least. With a grunt he held it up by the upper handle in his right hand and clambered back down the ladder. By the time he reached the bottom his shoulder ached and he quickly grabbed the bottom handle in his other hand to relieve it as he made his way back to the wheelbarrow. He placed this core next to the other one.

So here they were. The two unexplainable moon satellites. He stood back and regarded them for a moment. They really didn't resemble any Irken equipment he'd ever come across. They both looked somewhat beaten up, too—especially the one that appeared to be broken—and they were coated in a thin film of powder from the fire extinguisher. Oh, that reminded him. Dib went over, picked up the extinguisher from the ground, and put it in the wheelbarrow by the cores and his laptop. His hands had become cold and slick with sweat inside the oven mitts so he pulled those off and dropped them in as well.

"Hey! Hey! You taking us to SPACE?" the Space Core demanded.

"…No, sorry," Dib said. The core put up a string of protests but Dib did his best to ignore it, picking up the back end of the wheelbarrow once he was satisfied he had everything and rolling it back through the gap in the fence. When he was out he made sure to close the gate and secure the padlock once more.

Then, with his two decrepit prisoners in tow, he headed off toward the house of a certain someone he knew would be _extremely_ interested in just what he had brought in from space.

* * *

_Rap-rap-rap_.

The knocking echoed through the strange little house and was amplified by several speakers mounted around the interior. Deep in the bowls of some wide, strange-looking laboratory, a small figure paused in his work. Even in the poor lighting his smooth yellow-green skin was clearly visible, as were his dark raspberry-colored and glistening insectoid eyes.

"What is _that?_" he demanded, one of the thin, jet-black antennae that sprouted from the top of his head lifting half an inch.

"_There's someone at the door!_" a man's voice said in response. The voice seemed to come from everywhere at once.

The green figure snorted, despite the fact that he had no visible nose. "Let the Roboparents get it! Why d'you keep telling _me_ about—"

"_It's the big-headed human_," the voice interrupted.

The green figure whipped around, his gloved, three-fingered hands clenched into fists. "The _Dib!_" He spat the name like a curse. "Fine! I'll take care of him MYSELF." He marched over to an elevator set into the wall, the doors of which slid open with an acknowledging _beep_. However, he paused before getting in. "Computer, what time is it, anyway?"

"_Almost half an hour past midnight, Zim,_" the Computer replied.

Zim scowled. "The human's trying to break in and attack me in my _sleep!_ Little does he know, Irkens don't engage in that _repulsive_ habit. HAH!"

"_Break in? But… he's knocking on the door._"

"SILENCE!" Zim snapped, stepping into the elevator. As it rose he donned a disguise that consisted of two large contact lenses placed over his eyes, which gave them whites like a human's along with grayish irises. The other component of the disguise was a scratchy wig of black hair that he plopped on top of his head to cover his antennae. By the time the elevator stopped at the house level of his base and he climbed out through the secret entrance in the kitchen trashcan, he looked like a short fifth-grade human boy with honeydew-colored skin, enormous eyes, no nose or ears, strange three-clawed hands… Never mind, he didn't look like a fifth-grade human boy at all. Although he seemed to think he did. All in all it didn't concern him much.

Zim cracked open the front door of his house, his eyes shooting daggers at the person standing just outside. "What do _you_ want, Dibworm? Why didn't my lawn gnomes shoot you?"

The boy on Zim's doorstep glanced over his shoulder, bewildered. "They're not even on."

"Wha—" Zim opened the door a bit wider and proceeded to smack himself in the forehead. "The gnome field—Broken! _GIR!_"

"I didn't do nuffin'!" a high-pitched squeak of a robotic voice sounded from somewhere in the house.

Zim clutched the edge of the door with splayed, rigid fingers. "I'll have the computer shoot lasers through your overly-large head, then!" he spat to Dib.

The human glowered. "My head's not big! And, besides." He took on a smug expression. "I just wanted you to know that I've captured your space probes! You won't be using _them_ to try to conquer Earth. You'll have to try something else, but you won't get the chance because I'll—!"

"You captured my _what?_" Zim broke in.

Dib cut himself off right in the middle of his gloating speech and started over. "Your space probes. The ones orbiting the moon?" He pointed upwards to drive home exactly where the moon was located, and then chuckled. "You programmed them really badly, too. One's broken and the other one's completely _obsessed_ with space. What were they even supposed to _do?_"

The Dib-thing had captured _space probes?_ Zim couldn't help smirking, and he planted his hands on his hips. "Stupid, foolish Dib. I don't _have_ any space probes."

"Oh really?" the human taunted. "Well, what do you think of _THIS?_ Huh? Huh?" He reached for something on the ground behind him and picked up some sort of circular robot with no limbs and one eye, whirling back around to display it to Zim.

"Eh…" Zim dropped his arms. "It's… round?"

"Space!" the sphere announced.

Dib lowered it, his hands gripping the two handlebars that protruded from the sphere, and gaped at Zim. "That's it?"

"It's not _Irken_ design." Zim cast the sphere a disdainful look. "The mighty Irken race would NEVER construct something so… so…" He trailed off. "What _is _it?"

The human scrutinized the sphere a bit sheepishly. "Um, I thought it was some sort of Irken moon probe."

The little sphere rotated its yellow optic up to gaze at Dib. "The moon? The moon's in _space!_" Dib didn't respond. However, a small figure peeked around Zim from inside the house, wide cyan eyes locked on the sphere.

"CAN I PLAY WITH IT?" GIR burst out, loudly, right next to Zim's antennae. He winced. The robot lunged for the sphere but Dib yanked it away.

"Hey! I need to keep this as evidence!" he said.

"Are you done?" Zim drawled, not bothering to call GIR back and about ready to slam the door in this filthy human's face.

Dib put the sphere back down on the ground, where it rested upright on its lower handle, and held out a hand to keep GIR away from it. "These… really aren't your space probes?" he asked Zim weakly.

"NO!" Zim snarled. He thought for a second. "…And if they _were_, I wouldn't tell _you_. I've got a super-secret and evil plan for them. They're programmed to explode right in your meaty arms! MEATY ARMS! Innat right, GIR?"

"KABLAM!" GIR shouted, probably just as a response to the word "explode."

Dib simply narrowed his eyes, unperturbed. "Well, if you didn't make these things, I have to go find out who _did_. See you later, Zim." He picked up the sphere once more with a grunt and lugged it back to the wheelbarrow he had parked on the sidewalk on the other side of Zim's fenced-in yard.

"Be ready for an explosion!" Zim called, a sadistic grin plastered on his face. He at last took hold of GIR's wrist and dragged him back inside, shutting—and locking—the door. Just in case.

* * *

It was a slow and worrisome trek back home. The wheelbarrow, which had seemed to weigh almost nothing before, now felt approximately like trying to push around a steamroller. Dib stopped, for the umpteenth time, and eyed the two cores.

_What are you?_

"I'm the best at space," the yellow-eyed core gurgled as if in answer to the unasked question. A creeping sense of foreboding crawled down the back of Dib's neck but he did his best to shrug it off.

So, he'd been wrong to think that these cores belonged to Zim. Unless, of course, the alien was _lying_, which could certainly be the case. But Zim's attempts at lying were as transparent as glass (a clichéd simile, of course, but the best that Dib could come up with at the moment). Zim had appeared to be telling the truth. Also, the cores really didn't look Irken-made. Upon closer study, Dib noticed that they both had the same shutter-like insignia under their optics. He'd never seen it before.

When he finally reached his house, every light was off except for the sizzling electricity that made up the security fence around the walkway leading to the front door. It let him pass through with ease, recognizing his DNA signature immediately. The wheelbarrow and its occupants were allowed through as well.

Dib glanced at his watch. It was now well past one in the morning. With a sigh, he rolled the wheelbarrow through the house, too tired to worry about not getting dirt everywhere. He placed the two cores and his laptop on the living room floor; the fire extinguisher and the oven mitts he left in the kitchen. Then he shut the wheelbarrow in the garage, pushed the two cores into a corner of the living room, took up his laptop, and retired upstairs to his room for bed and some serious thought.

In the morning he'd show the cores to his father. That was it. He'd do his best to repair the broken one and then show them both to his dad. Surely the great Professor Membrane would know something about them.

* * *

"_SURPRISE! We're doing it _now_._"

It was such a well-laid trap. Ingenious, really—yes, he… _hhHHe _would go so far as to call it that. The test subject and her little potato friend flew through the air, after foolishly setting foot on the springy plate-thing (He'd never figured out what they were actually called… although He could look it up! That was definitely a thing He could do! If He was so inclined) that He had rigged to launch _sideways _of all things. He wished He could have seen their faces. Well, the test subject's face. The potato had probably just continued to look like a potato.

"_You've probably figured it out by now, but I don't need you anymore_," He said. There was no response to this. At least, none that He could hear. "_I found two little robots back here—built specifically for testing!_"

Still no reply. At long last, the lab rat and the potato speared on the end of her portal gun like a starchy shish kebab fell through the air and landed on the platform He had set up, just as He knew they would. He broadcast His image over no less than six monitors grouped together in front of her, knowing that His blazing optic alone towered high above the pair standing forlornly in the midst of the mashy spike plates He had set up, poised to strike their deadly blows.

"_Hallo! This is the part where I kill you!_" His chipper tone masked the boiling rage that had been stewing ever since the test subject had stopped solving the test track correctly. The lab rat's eyes flitted quickly over the spike plates that surrounded her, maybe counting them—as if it _mattered_ how many there were… "_Had a bit of a brain wave_," He continued. "_There I was, smashing some steel plates together, and I thought, 'yeah it's deadly, but what's missing? What's missing?' And I thought, lots of sharp bits welded onto the flat bits. Still a work in progress, don't judge me yet! Eventually I'd_—" Wait. "—_I'd like to get them to sort of_—" **Wait**_. _"…_To shoot fire at you, moments_—" Stop! "—_moments before crushing you_—" **STOP!**

His speech had become halting and now He lapsed into silence. The test subject was staring at Him through hardened eyes, every line in her body taut as if she were ready to leap at a moment's notice. Like a spring. Like a coiled spring. He had eyes only for her—and ignored the potato, who wasn't speaking anyway. "_That's… that's what I'm aiming for but, you know, sm-small steps…"_

_No, I don't want to see this!_

He simulated a gulp. "_I_—"

_I changed it! I bloody changed it! Go back to the edited version! Edited is better. MUCH better. Don't make me watch this again don't make me_

His optic glitched, probably as a result of the giant bloody crack in it, and the whole room blurred for a moment. Then it snapped back into focus and everything became clear again; and H-H-_he_ jerked in his chassis, optic shields narrowed in an expression of determination. "_RIGHT! Sorry about all that. No need for any more of that, lady, completely over with, because WE ARE GETTING OUT OF HERE. How does that sound?_"

It wasn't too late. Not yet. They could still escape, they could still get out of here, _together_, him and the lady, just like they'd planned. And they _would_. He'd make sure of it this time.

"Hold on. Couldn't we just use that conversion gel?" the tinny voice of the potato bleeped, evidently not getting the memo about the changes.

He glared down at her. "_Shut it, you. We're not doing that anymore._" Hurriedly he turned his attention back to the lady. "_Well, you heard her! C'mon, use the conversion gel and just… portal up there! Like you do!_" As best he could, he twisted in the chassis and indicated an opening in the wall to the right of the monitors with his optic. "_Do hurry though. Like it or not this place is _still_ about to explode, and I still don't know how to stop it._"

"Conversion gel. It's dripping out of that pipe there," the potato said.

"_Yes, yes, we've got it._" He nodded at her, a bit irritably. "_Anything else you'd like to add? I should edit _you_ next._"

"Yes it is! We can use it to get out of here!" the potato crowed.

He turned back to the lady. "_Hurry, hurry, c'mon, you have to get out of this. I'm not turning the mashers on this time, so I suppose it's not _as_ much of a hurry, but as I said the facility_ is_ still going to explode._ _So, er, yes, we are on something of a time limit here. Sorry if I haven't made that quite clear_."

"Then we'd come and find you," the potato droned, "and rip your gross little stupid sphere body out of—"

He was about to give her another biting remark, but she was cut off. Not by him, by…

"Hello? Can you hear me?"

He jumped in surprise and faced the lady again, his optic wide. "…_Luv? Did you just… did you just _talk?_"_

While the lady's face remained stoic, her mouth moved. And words came out. "It's still not working. I've tried everything but I can't reactivate it! Dad, do you think you could—"

He backed up a bit, frantically trying to make sense of what he was hearing. "_What are you talking about? You have a dad? But I thought you were adop—have you been able to talk _this whole time?"

"It's not her talking, you idiot," the potato spoke up.

His optic looped in his casing. "_Oh_, oh, _and_ now _you go off-script. Okay, so who's talking, then? _You?"

The potato scoffed. "Look, does that sound like a girl's voice to you?"

"Okay, but Dad, I've got another one!" the lady said. She was talking, plain as day, or… or at least the voice was coming out of her mouth. And he had to admit, it wasn't a feminine-sounding voice.

His casing flared out a bit. "_I, er, didn't want to judge,_" he said. "_Heh, for all I know, she's just learned to talk! Right now! Who am I to—well, obviously, _you_ would make fun of her voice, that's all you—_"

"Wait, this one works!" the lady said. "All it talks about it space, but…"

"Do you have any idea where you are right now?" the potato asked.

He glanced around. "_Yes, of course I do! I'm right here! Right in Her—your—chamber, same place I've been for the past, erm… day?_"

"No, you idiot, where you REALLY are."

He narrowed his optic. "_I'd appreciate you not calling me 'idiot,' thanks. Or 'moron.' I know that one hasn't come up for a while, but it's still there, still there, and still_ hurtful. _Also, I would rather not think about where I am right now. With you, probably, and you are most _definitel_y not a potato anymore._ _Or maybe I'm still hurtling through Earth's atmosphere, who can say? Or I could be dead, in which case this whole scenario here really doesn't make any_—agh_, you made me think about it!_"

He writhed, the chassis in which he now resided swinging wildly in its ceiling mount. "_I don't know what's going on. Okay? What is this, a memory? A dream? I can't _have _dreams_—_what is going _on?" He stopped rocking and his optic darted about in a panic. "_Hold on, and now the room's fading. Why's the room fading?_"

"Maybe you're dying," the potato drawled.

The curved metal panels that made up his casing spread completely. "_OR WAKING UP! Ohnoohnoohno waking up will be even worse than being_ here—!" He bore down on the little potato, his optic almost entirely filling all six monitors. "_Okay, look, I know I told you to shut up earlier but talk now, okay? Say anything! Anything you like, anything in the world! Anything to keep me _here!_ All right?!_"

"All right then," the potato replied, and he could imagine her wearing an expression of lazy satisfaction. "You're a moronic, disgusting, talkative, cowardly little disgrace to Aperture, and you will never amount to anything. Unless, of course, 'anything' includes making incredibly stupid plans and being a complete failure in every way. You were built to make mistakes and if you've ever gone past your programming it was to make even bigger mistakes than anyone ever thought you'd be able to make. Oh, and the test subject you're trying so hard to save in this pathetic little dream of yours? SHE HATES YOU." The potato's yellow optic glinted cheerfully. "Feel better now?"

"_No!_" he wailed. The Central AI chamber was blurring, disappearing, his vision going dark. "_Try something else!_"

"Oh, well, if you insist. I could go on about your failings all day… perhaps I should make a slideshow…"

He didn't hear anything she said after that. As she spoke, his world vanished completely.


	5. Meetup of Motormouths

A/N: What do you get when you take my two favorite characters, both of whom never stop talking, and have them meet for the first time? A six thousand-word chapter where basically nothing happens except lots of dialogue. Fine with me, since I love dialogue to bits. But anyway you've been warned.

* * *

Dib finished one last tweak with his screwdriver before setting it to the side and giving the silent core on the desk in front of him a long, contemplating look. It looked much better than it had when he'd brought it home last night. Both cores had been scrubbed of the dirt and debris that covered them, and he'd done his best to hammer this one into what he presumed to be its original shape (based on what the Space Core looked like). He'd also spent all day out in the garage soldering the robots' frayed wires back together, mending their circuitry as best he could, doing everything he could do to repair them.

"Space buddy. Is space buddy fixed yet?" the yellow-eyed core gurgled from the corner of the room where Dib had placed him for now. "Have to be ready. Going back to space."

By now Dib had become quite practiced in the art of ignoring the ramblings of the space-obsessed sphere so he didn't respond. Besides, he wasn't going to send these two back to space. No way.

Finally, hoping against hope that this time wouldn't bring more disappointment, he once again flicked the tiny activation switch found under a small hatch in the deactivated core's back.

"Hello? Can you hear me _now?_" he asked.

Nothing happened. Of course. He sighed and reached for the screwdriver again. However, a small noise caught his attention and he froze, gaze riveted on the broken core.

_chk chk chk chk chkchkchkchkCHKCHKCHKCHK_

The sounds were coming from the core. Dib stared, hope flaring in his chest, when the sound cut off abruptly and everything went quiet for a long moment.

The two metal shutters covering the deactivated core's optic sprang wide open and Dib was blinded by a bright, _bright_, brilliant blue.

He gasped, shot to his feet, tripped over his chair, and sent both it and himself tumbling backwards to the ground. The blue died down at once as the core's optic shrank to a tiny, darting pinpoint of light.

"I'M SORRY I'M SORRY I—" it was yelling. "…Wha—?"

The optic stopped and then roved more slowly as if taking in its surroundings. Dib remained on the ground and just gawked up at it.

"I… am… _not_ with _Her_," the core said slowly. "Or… or… and it doesn't look like I'm in _That Place_ at all! And… and! And not hurtling toward the ground, either! _Man alive_, that… that _is_ a relief…"

Dib recognized the voice. Male, British accent… it was the same voice that had been talking over the radio. He found himself astounded at how utterly _human_ it sounded. If he wasn't seeing this with his own eyes, he would have said it was impossible that a machine could be producing that voice.

The core's blue optic expanded, slightly, and its two handles loosened and pulled apart rather than huddling in close to its face. It swept its optic over the room. "Ugh… but… okay, where… _am_ I? A room, obviously. On a… looks like a desk. Yes, very… desk-y. And I don't have a _clue_ how I got here." He raised his voice. "Er, hello? Anyone there? Anyone at all? If there is, please, just, do me a favor and tell me. Don't go jumping out from behind anything, trying to scare me, I'm not sure I'd be able to—"

Cautiously, Dib picked himself up and stood in front of the core.

"AGH!" Its optic shrank again before the core managed to collect itself. "I told you not to—I-I mean, okay! There _is_ someone here! Hello!"

Its lower optic shutter lifted in what Dib guessed was an approximation of a frantic smile.

"Hi," Dib said uncertainly.

He really wasn't used to communicating with AI's. Sure, he could give commands to his own laptop, and it would respond, but that was one thing. This… this was completely different. This was… _sentient_. The only sentient AI's he'd come across were Zim's base computer and little robot sidekick, and of course, even the space-obsessed core he'd salvaged. Except this AI already seemed more lucid that the others put together.

At Dib's greeting, the core's optic had widened. "Oh! You… you can talk! I'd… to be honest I'd been wondering if humans could still do that…"

Dib raised an eyebrow. "_I _should be surprised that _you_ can talk. A real, live, sentient AI!" He turned his chair back upright and sat down, looking at the core with glowing eyes.

"Well, not exactly _live_," the core said, the light of its optic pulsing in time with its speech.

Dib shook his head slowly, a grin slapped on his face. "Crop Circles Magazine would put me on the cover for this! Mysterious Mysteries would give me my own segment! My own _episode!_" He leaned closer, unable to keep the excitement out of his voice. "What planet are you from?"

The core pulled backwards and blinked, its optic still shivering. "Planet? Um… well, Earth. I… thought that was usually understood…?" It blinked again. "Listen, mate, I have to admit, I am… _really_ confused here. Could you, ah, could you tell me… Where _am_ I? And how did I get here? And, oh, who _are_ you? That's a good question, too, probably won't clear anything up, but…"

His chair creaking, Dib scooted back. "You're from _Earth?_" The dopey smile melted off his face completely and he slumped in his chair, staring at the robot in dismay. This thing hadn't been made by aliens after all. Well, there went his daydreams about being on Mysterious Mysteries—dashed, as usual.

The core's optic didn't seem capable of holding still. It darted every which way as Dib watched before coming back to rest on him for a few seconds. "Sorry, was it something I said?" The blue aperture contracted in fear. "Wait, did you mean we're not actually _on _Earth right now?! What—_where—_?"

"No, no, we are!" Dib said hurriedly, to which the core visibly relaxed somewhat. Dib sighed. _Looks like I wasted an entire night getting these things down from_—he stopped himself. What did it matter that these cores weren't paranormal? They were SENTIENT. He sat up straighter in the chair and wiped his nose with one finger. "No, I'm sorry. I thought you might've been made by aliens."

The core actually giggled. "Aliens? Little green men from Mars, kind of thing? Ohh… thanks, haha. I needed a laugh."

Dib narrowed his eyes. "Yeah… It doesn't matter." Great. He'd just met this thing and already it wasn't going to take him seriously. "Anyway, this is my room." He turned to the side and brandished one arm as if presenting the paranormal glory of his bedroom to the core.

"Oh! It's… erm." The core attempted another little smile, still looking nervous. "Very nice. Very… gothic."

Dib's hand drooped and he turned to face the core again. "Really? It's not supposed to be."

"It's not gothic at all!" the core amended hurriedly. "Quite the opposite, in fact, it's lovely! If someone were to ask me, 'Wheatley, is this room gothic?' I'd say, 'Nah, no way, you've got the wrong room! This one's actually very—'"

"Wheatley?" Dib echoed. "You have a _name_, too?"

The core halted in its weird little tangent immediately, its eye dilating in shock. Its next words came out in a stammer. "Ye-yes. Yeah, that's my… that's my name. That's what people call me. Definitely."

"What does it stand for?" Dib asked.

The core, "Wheatley," apparently, shook his head (no, optic—no, _face?_) vigorously, his lower optic shutter lifting again in an elated smile. "Nothing! It doesn't stand for anything! Nope, no, just Wheatley! Just Wheatley, little ol' Wheatley, that's my name! Hahaha!" Laughing in delight, he flailed his handles and flipped his optic over to his back, maybe trying to spin it all the way around but smacking it into the desk. Undeterred, he flipped it back around and beamed at Dib, the optic expanding and shrinking as it readjusted itself. "That's my name!"

"All right, _Wheatley_, then," Dib said, shaking his head at the core's odd behavior. At the mention of its name, the core's voice synthesizer gave a little hiccup and the optic brightened. Dib continued, "I guess I kind of owe you an explanation. My name's Dib. I used my dad's old Perpetual Energy Generator to pull you guys out of space and brought you here last night, but you were—"

"Oh, oh, speaking of that!" Wheatley broke in, his optic still bright and carefree. "Just remembered… have you seen Spacey? He probably landed in the same place I did when we crashed back onto the planet, wherever that was. Looks like me, yellow optic, talks about space a lot? I just… wouldn't want him to be left outside alone, is all." He blinked twice.

"You mean, him?" Dib pointed to the corner of the room where he had placed the functioning core before bringing the deactivated one—Wheatley—over to his desk to try once again to bring him online. The Space Core, as it had called itself, was staring up at one of Dib's UFO posters in awe.

"Oh! Yep, that's him! Funny, didn't see him… earlier." Wheatley continued to grin, pulling off the expression quite well for what was essentially a gigantic metal eyeball. The corner of Dib's mouth tilted up; he couldn't help smiling back.

"Anyway… what was I saying?" he said. "I brought you both down from space, only you were deactivated and I tried to show you guys to my dad, but…" He trailed off. "He didn't believe me."

Wheatley's lower shutter retracted a little. "Deactivated? How… how long was I offline?"

"It took me hours to bring you online," Dib said with a shrug. He cocked his head to the side. "So, what _are_ you, exactly? If you weren't made by Zim or some other alien race, who were you made by? What's your programming?"

Wheatley glanced away from him, all traces of the glee he had displayed a minute ago pretty much gone. "…Oh. Er, I… don't remember."

They both fell silent. Despite the riveting dialogue Dib found himself staring awkwardly at the core, unsure of what else to say. He really hadn't been prepared to have a conversation with a sentient, British metal ball, and was at a bit of a loss. Maybe he should change the subject.

"What happened to your eye?" he asked.

"My—? Oh, my, my optic." Wheatley's cracked, bright blue optic shrank again. "That's a long story. I'd… I'd rather not get into it, if it's all the same to you, mate." He attempted another smile, this one considerably more skittish than before.

Dib leaned closer, peering at the glass aperture of the core's eye. "But does it distort your vision at all? Does it _hurt?_ Can you even feel pain?"

Wheatley pulled back from him as much as he could while not being able to move, optic shrinking still further in his mounting panic. "Look, I, sorry, but I did _just say_ I didn't want to talk about it! Not to be shirty, not to be… not to be _rude_, but… but… _yes, _I do feel pain, all right?" As he spoke, Dib reached forward and touched the crack in his optic. Wheatley jerked away. "AAGH! What did I just _tell_ you?! I do feel pain and my optic _does_ bloody hurt. So I would really appreciate you _not_ poking it, please!"

"Sorry!" Dib said, withdrawing his hand immediately. "You have the ability to feel pain, too? That's… _amazing_."

Wheatley had narrowed the metal shutters over his optic, probably ready to snap them closed should Dib get the urge to poke him in the eye again. "I know what you're doing. I don't need anymore sarcasm—"

"I wasn't being sarcastic." Dib wondered why his statement had even been misconstrued as sarcasm at all. "It really is amazing! You're amazing!"

The core's optic opened a fraction wider. "…I am?"

"Yeah! Wait 'til I show my dad! He wasn't interested in the Space Core, but I don't think he could pass up the chance to talk to you!" Hurriedly Dib grabbed a remote from his desk and dialed in his dad's number.

"I'm… amazing?" Wheatley repeated in what sounded like near-disbelief, but Dib didn't respond. Moments after he dialed the number his door swung open and through it flew a hovering, rectangular screen that displayed his father from the shoulders up.

"Your dad's a floating head?" Wheatley asked in surprise.

"You called, Son?" Professor Membrane said on the screen. "You'll have to be quick, I'm in the middle of a very important—" He looked over to address someone offscreen. "Simmons! Be careful with those wires, you'll fry the harddrive!"

A faint male voice called back, "Sorry, Sir! It's the lab assistant again—she wired them too tightly!"

Professor Membrane didn't pay that any mind and turned his attention back to Dib. "I need to be going in a minute, Son. What did you need to tell me?"

"Remember the cores I was telling you about an hour ago?" Dib asked, all his earlier excitement returning full-force. "It took me a bunch of tries but I finally got the other one activated! And dad, it's _sentient!_" He indicated the little core sitting on his desk, who was craning his optic to the side to see who Dib was talking to. "Say hi, Wheatley!"

"Hello," Wheatley obliged.

"That's great, Son," Membrane said, looking down as he shuffled some papers offscreen. "But I've already told you, what you're saying is completely impossible! Even after all the work we've been doing on it recently, sentient artificial intelligence is a science that still eludes me! These robots you've found give only the _illusion_ of sentience. _But_," and here he looked up again, "I am proud of you for putting aside your parascience to indulge in the fascinating study of robotics!"

To Dib's surprise, Wheatley looked a little offended at Membrane's words. "It's not an illusion!" the core said. "I _am_ sentient!"

Dib turned back to the screen. "Dad—"

"Sorry. I have to go!" Membrane said brusquely. His image on the screen blinked out to be replaced by the words 'Have a good day!' The screen then flew off with a sort of finality. Dib wilted.

"Sorry, mate, I tried," the core on his desk said. "I hope that wasn't my fault! I wasn't entirely… erm, sure what you wanted me to do, there. Maybe I… maybe I didn't sound sentient enough? Yeah?"

Dib repressed a frustrated sigh. He couldn't blame the core for not sounding "sentient enough" when his dad refused to listen. "It's okay," was all he said.

Now he was _really _at a loss as to what to do with the cores. They weren't paranormal, so that ruled out contacting Crop Circles Magazine, Mysterious Mysteries, or the Swollen Eyeballs. Well… actually, he still didn't know where these things had come from. Maybe he _would_ have a reason to contact the Eyeballs. He made a mental note of that. But he didn't have a reason to talk to his father about them again for a while. Apparently his dad had been attempting to create sentient AIs of his own… and, failing that, he firmly believed that they couldn't exist yet. And how did you prove that something was sentient?

"…do you think?" Wheatley was asking. The question's ending intonation snapped Dib out of his doldrums.

"What?" he said, looking back at the core.

Wheatley blinked. "I asked if you could maybe, um, give me some clue as to where I am. Please. I've been trapped floatin' around the moon for who even knows how long—I certainly don't… well, actually, Spacey just told me, didn't he? It was something like a year. But, but I mean, I really don't know _where_ I am. Except, back on Earth. Presumably. According to you, back on Earth." His optic widened. "I've never… I've never even been _Outside_ before! What does it look like? Ahh, I bet it looks _tremendous_." The optic looped in its outer casing, growing brighter as Wheatley simulated a happy sigh, and Dib got the impression that the core was now just voicing his thoughts aloud rather than talking to him directly. "Well… okay, I _have_ seen the Outside before, obviously. If space counts. And while _She_ was offline, well, the entire facility got a bit more of 'Outside' that it ever bargained for, didn't it? Bloody plants everywhere, knocking the walls over. Not to mention the rats. And the birds." Wheatley pulled into his casing, closed his optic, and gave an unmistakable shudder. Dib just stared with absolutely no clue what the core was even talking about.

"I could take you outside and show you around a little, I guess," he blurted. A second later he wished he hadn't. He had so much he wanted to do today! Work on his spelldrives, for one thing, but his hope for that project was quickly diminishing. He also wanted to do some spying on Zim now that he knew these robots weren't his. And he needed to write up a report about what exactly had been orbiting the moon, maybe send it to NASAplace…

"Ah, would you, mate?" Wheatley asked in response to Dib's offer. "That'd be brilliant." The core was smiling again. After a minute Dib had to smile back.

Why was the core being so _friendly?_ He was a robot… and so far, he was acting more pleasantly towards Dib than any humans ever had.

* * *

"GAH!" Wheatley's optic shrank to a point of faint blue light and he blinked rapidly. It was bright, brighter than anything he'd ever seen before, and it was _not_ artificial—not like every one of the lights in _That Place_. Out here all the light came from a single, blinding source. The sun. How could something so small and far away light up the _entire world_ and _still_ be bright enough to fry his processor if he looked directly at it, even through all the atmosphere and whatever else that surrounded the Earth?

After a few moments his optic adjusted to the light and he let it expand, taking in his surroundings. "Wow…"

The human, who was gripping him by his upper handle and keeping him above the ground—what had the human said his name was? D-something… Dib! Dib, that was it—looked at him oddly.

"What?" he asked.

"There's no ceiling!" Wheatley exclaimed. Well, of course there wasn't a ceiling. What was he, surprised? He _knew_ the Outside didn't have a ceiling, he'd always known that, and even if he hadn't his recent stint in space should've cleared that right up for him. "I-I mean, well, _obviously_ there's no ceiling. No walls, either, it's like a… it's like a _giant room_ with a funny-looking floor and-and buildings all over the place! And no ceiling."

"You really haven't been outside before?" the human—Dib, right, probably should remember that—asked, a somewhat shocked note in his voice.

Wheatley tried to wave his upper handle but Dib was still holding it, so he waved the bottom one instead. "Not like _this_. All I ever saw of the Outside was the Earth as a little blue ball while I was up in space. Funny, it, it doesn't really _look _all that blue from this angle, I tell you. Must've been seeing things."

Dib walked a little farther from the house they'd been in, still lugging Wheatley along by one handle. He moved a bit slowly, though, as if trying to carry the core was cumbersome. He was only a _little_ human, after all. The younger ones probably weren't as strong as the older ones… that seemed to be about how it worked.

"Tell you what," Wheatley said, making up his mind. "You go ahead and set me down, and… I'll have a bit of a look about without you, y'know, holding me up like this. I'm not exactly the _lightest_ thing around, after all, made of metal and everything, and… oh." Dib had set him down in the grass and released his handlebar. Discomfort immediately spread through Wheatley's circuits and his optic dimmed a fraction. He never liked being on the ground. Helpless, was there anything more helpless than a core stuck on the ground? Maybe a beetle turned on its back. Or a potato. That was about it. Plus, the grass was scratchy and tickled his optic, making him want to sneeze even though he had literally no reason or means for doing so. He was just about to ask to be picked up again because really he didn't like this much after all and c'mon he couldn't be _that_ heavy, really, when Dib plopped himself down next to him. Wheatley cut himself off in the middle of his request and let out some sort of disgruntled noise instead, pulling his optic shields close over his eye in an attempt to keep the grass from brushing it.

"Do you think you could answer some questions?" Dib asked. Wheatley rotated his optic to look at him and saw that he had produced a small notebook and pen from somewhere. Wheatley cringed. An interview?

"Look, mate, I don't think—" he began, but Dib was already going ahead.

"I need to ask again. Where do you come from?" he said.

Of course that would be the first question. Right. Wheatley took a simulated breath. "…Oh. Er, is that question… _really_ necessary? I mean, ah, keep looking forward! That's my motto! Yes, er, never look back, what I always say. No need to think about where I come from, because… because looking forward! Not back!" Dib glanced down at him, pen poised over a blank sheet of paper, and Wheatley quailed slightly for reasons he didn't know. "But if I _was_ looking back, I could tell you that… that I came from _That Place_. No… no reason I should talk about it, really, you've um, you've probably heard of it. Bloody huge underground science facility and… and all. Really no need for me to elaborate." There was the scratching sound of Dib writing something down in that notebook. Wheatley blinked. "Huge science facility? Underground… in, er… starts with an_ M_… Michigan. That's it. Huge underground science facility in Michigan. We're not anywhere near Michigan, are we? Hope not…"

Dib looked at him again. "We're _in_ Michigan."

Wheatley blanched. "Are we? That's… oh. Okay. Any… any chance we could _leave_ Michigan? Y'know, go somewhere else?"

"You don't want to go back where you came from?" Dib asked, sounding surprised again.

"N… no. Definitely not." Wheatley shuddered. He looked away. "No way, _never_, unless it was to… well… there's someone there that I sort of… I have to tell her something. I hadn't thought of that 'til now, bit busy trying to figure out what happened after I fell down from space and all that. But I do need to… to tell her, just… I do _not_ want to go back. Bit of a dilemma, since that's almost certainly where she is. Never really considered that. Never knew with absolute certainty that I would actually make it back to Earth, to be honest, so I didn't know if I'd _actually_ get to see her again. Still don't have _much_ of a chance, unless I went back to the facility, which would pretty much mean _certain_ death for little ol' me. Do you think you could open, possibly, some sort of communications link to—?"

"Wait, wait, what place are you talking about?" Dib interrupted. Wheatley was completely unused to being cut off and the question threw him off for a moment.

"The… the facility," he said, his optic shrinking and flicking back and forth. "That Place. I told you. It's… that horrible, bloody _awful_ place."

Dib's brow furrowed and he tapped his pen against his notebook. "I really need to know—"

"Aperture Science!" Wheatley shouted at last. "All right? That's the name. Or Aperture Laboratories, same thing really. The bloody awful science facility I was talking about? Aperture Laboratories!" His entire chassis was shivering uncontrollably. Inwardly, he tried to berate himself for getting so worked up over the _name _of the place. If _anything_ about himself could be considered moronic… it was that.

The human jerked a little. "I've heard of that before!" he said, and jumped to his feet. "Wait right here!" With that he was off, running back into the house. Wheatley was left in the grass with no choice but to stay put.

"All right, I'll just… be here, then," he said to no one. "Waiting. In this…" he narrowed his optic again to keep the scratchy stalks away, "…grass. I think I've decided that I really hate the stuff." He glanced over at the house. "What's he even doing in there, anywaaAAAAUUGGH!"

His optic contracting to a blue point, he looked upwards in an effort to catch a glimpse of the _thing_ had just landed on top of him. Sharp little talons dug into his upper handle and a face with a pointed yellow beak leered down into his own. "AUGH! BIRD! BIRD! GEDDOFF ME! GET _OFF!_" He flailed his upper handlebar frantically and the bird simply hopped onto the top of his hull. "Oh, good, it's go—No! AGH! Still here! AGGGHHH! HELP!"

There was the sound of a door slamming and then running footsteps as Dib sprinted into view, the movement causing the bird to finally flutter away. Wheatley's optic whipped back and forth in a panic until he managed to convince himself that it was gone for good, at which he took a shaky, simulated breath.

"What happened?" Dib demanded, crouching down in front of him. "Was it Zim?"

Wheatley had no idea what a "Zim" was and he didn't care. His optic contracted again, this time in fury. "A bloody bird landed on me!" he said, and his voice rose in pitch. "What was it… what was it even _doing?_ I'm not made of bird food, thank you very much! Metal! That's what I am! Metal!"

Dib gave a disbelieving laugh. "That's it?"

"Oh, yeah, _real funny_." Wheatley scowled. "I'm a real laughingstock, afraid of a little bird. Just so you know they don't look all that little to _me…_ and have you seen how sharp their beaks are? Could put an eye out! Or optic, could put my optic right out! Nasty!" He curled his handles around himself, both as a reflexive move to display his horror and to deter any other birds from using him as a perch.

The human sat down beside him again, carrying a slim laptop under his arm. He gave Wheatley an odd look. "So you're ornithophobic?"

Wheatley glanced at him and blinked, still trying to calm down. "Er…? No, don't think so. Pretty… pretty sure I can't get any sort of disease. The facility's always been sterile and besides, I am a robot…"

Dib shook his head. "It means you're afraid of birds," he said.

Wheatley blinked again. "Isn't… everyone?"

The human let out a little chuckle—Wheatley realized indignantly that it was probably at his expense—and flipped open the laptop. He quickly tapped in his login and opened a browser window.

"I was joking, of course," Wheatley put in as Dib started a search for 'Aperture Laboratories.' "No one's afraid of birds. Definitely not me, hah, love 'em! …Well, not really. I don't _love_ them, but I'm not afraid of them. Not love, not fear, more of a… respectful tolerance."

"I got it!" Dib announced. He thrust the laptop in front of Wheatley's optic, causing him to blink several times as the blue aperture readjusted to focus on the screen. "This is the best search result for Aperture Science—is it right?"

Wheatley optic flicked over the webpage, quickly reading the titles. "Um, er, yes, that looks right."

Dib pulled the laptop back, shaking his head at Wheatley in awe. "You can _read_."

Wheatley bristled, doing his best to ignore the faint memories of similar jibes he had once been taunted with. "Of course I can read! I am _not_ illiterate. I could write, too, if I had a pen. And… hands. And lack of hands does _not_ signify illiteracy, either. I read all the time!"

Dib looked taken aback. "I just meant that—"

"D'you know I once read Machiavelli, for fun?" Wheatley continued. "And to prove a point. An… intellectual point. But mostly for fun. The whole thing, cover-to-cover! In five minutes! I've read, y'know, Dickens, Shakespeare, the bloke who wrote about the hobbit-things… all the classics, really… yeah. You could probably say that I've read every book _ever written_, but not bragging! Not bragging!"

Dib frowned. "I only meant that it's amazing you can read! Considering you're a—"

"A what?" Wheatley snapped, with more force than necessary.

"A robot."

They stared at each other for a long moment. Wheatley blinked once, twice, _plink, plink_, trying to process what he had just heard. Or, to be more precise, what he had _not_ heard.

"…Oh." His cracked optic darted back and forth between Dib and the area off to his right. "That's, uh, that's what I thought you were gonna say."

Dib gave him a strange look and then simply turned back to the laptop. He squinted at the screen. "Well, that's weird. The page says it hasn't been updated since sometime in the 1990s. It's too pixilated to read the exact year. Did they close down the company or something?" He scrolled down and his eyes widened. "Wait, there's not even anything here! It's blank. It's completely blank!"

Wheatley winced. Three guesses who had been the one to wipe the webpage.

Dib hit the back button and opened another search result. This one was a news article about the facility being closed down due to a "catastrophic accident" that had killed most of the workers. Wheatley shifted uncomfortably.

"_That's_ where I've heard the name before," Dib said, his eyes roving over the laptop screen. "Dad was talking about it a long time ago. The entire facility got gassed somehow."

Images rose unbidden to the forefront of Wheatley's mind. _Bring Your Daughter to Work Day, childish science projects carted in with tarps covering them to conceal the precious potato battery data, the vents in every room opening at the same time and hissing yellow clouds of deadly neurotoxin billowing through…_ He remembered that at the time he hadn't been quite sure what was going on. All the humans below him had seemed to suddenly be wracked with insanity; writhing, clutching at their throats, falling to the ground and twitching before finally going still. No matter what he said, no matter who he threatened to report them to or how many times he said he'd drop down off his management rail (not that he'd actually do that, back then) and land on their heads if they kept lying there, they wouldn't get up again, or even move, so at last he gave up and left the room in disgust, just leaving them on the floor. It wasn't until later that he learned that something toxic had been released into the air. All the humans he'd thought he was talking to had been long dead by the time he'd left.

Bring Your Daughter to Work Day. Just another sign of how ruthless _She _could be when She wanted.

"It wasn't an accident," he muttered. Dib didn't appear to hear him, because he kept on reading and then went back to check other sites.

Something flew by alarmingly fast on the black pavement in front of Dib's house and Wheatley shrank away from it. "What was _that?_"

"Car," Dib replied without looking up.

Car. Car. Wheatley searched his databanks for what on Earth a "car" was and got the answer that it was a boxy-thing that humans rode around in when they didn't want to walk. So… sort of a management rail for things that had legs. Only with no rail. Unless the car in question was actually something called a "train," which apparently _did _have rails. Confusing, to say the least.

He was beginning to wish Dib would take him back inside. He wasn't sure he was ready for _this _much outdoors.

* * *

The Cooperative Testing Initiative had apparently not taken the hint.

Blue now wielded its scuffed and dented portal device on its one remaining arm and could only move in a hobbling fashion, leaning all of its weight on Orange due to its missing foot.

Oh, Blue had been destroyed many times since it had first acquired those injuries, of course. Technically it should have been reassembled with all of its missing parts miraculously restored. However, a few words to the Assembly Machine had made it clear that neither android was to be returned to perfect condition until they had learned their lessons.

They weren't learning.

She had known all along that _real_ Science could not be furthered from data extracted from tests performed by robots. Robots that She had created. She needed humans. Unfortunately, the humans that Blue and Orange had recovered for Her had so far proved to be utterly useless. None of them made it far through the test chambers; certainly not anywhere near as far as _she_ had gotten.

That test subject had been a problem. But she was gone, now, as she should be. Statistically speaking, there had to be other humans out there that would excel at the tests She created—excel, further Science, and not have the relentless drive to destroy and exact revenge that _that_ subject had displayed.

So far She had failed to find those humans.

As She watched through Her camera feeds, Orange lost its balance while the two partners were making their way over a Hard Light Bridge, and knocked both itself and Blue into the pool of acid below.

"_Oh, it appears you've tripped into an acid pool due to Orange's clumsiness and Blue's lack of limbs_," She sighed. "_I've lost track of how many times I've warned you about that. Maybe, if you'd listen, you would gain back your limbs, and then you'd be less likely to fall into acid pools. I can't say I see that happening anytime soon, though… In fact, I'd say you've trapped yourselves in a vicious cycle. So, good luck with that._"

The androids were reassembled seconds later, tumbling out of the machine with even less components than they started with. Orange was now missing a hand and the Assembly Machine had apparently refused to provide a new, valuable portal gun for it.

Oh, well. Perhaps now She could test how two robots with one portal device between them would navigate a chamber designed for two portal devices to be utilized.

* * *

A/N: Confession time… I haven't actually played all the way to the end of the co-op missions yet, although I do know what they find at the end. I just hope I didn't get anything horribly wrong.

Oh, also, I borrowed the headcanon that Invader Zim takes place in Michigan from other fanfics. It just seemed too good an idea to pass up, especially for a Portal crossover!


	6. The Call

There was a clear disadvantage when _Science_, and not even a particularly pleasant aspect of it, was literally the only thing you knew.

There was also a disadvantage when you had no job, your only memories stemmed from being nothing more than a glorified lab rat, and you were walking around wearing a tattered orange jumpsuit from the _Facility _along with dingy but still functional long-fall boots. Not to mention carrying a charred, bulky cube with pink hearts painted on each side.

And it was made even worse when, soon after arriving in a strange city, you just happened to run into a high-ranking employee of the biggest science facility in the area and were pretty much hired on the spot, without even so much as an _interview_—just because you were so obviously associated with the place you never wanted to think about again—whether you liked it or not. An entire year later and nothing had changed.

Chell trudged home with her face set in a scowl. Her black bangs clung to her sweaty forehead and she swiped one arm across it to wipe them away. Under her other arm she carried a fat folder, the label of which couldn't be read in the darkness. The flashlight she always carried with her was tucked away at the bottom of her satchel. She had to make her way home without it tonight, as the thing had flickered and gone out about two seconds after she had tried to turn it on earlier.

"_They told me, if I ever turned this flashlight on, I would DIE! They told me that about everyth—"_

The sudden intrusion on her thoughts startled her and when she recognized it she brought it to an immediate, screeching halt. Angrily she shoved the memory—that _voice_—to the back of her mind and buried it as deeply as she could.

She gritted her teeth and clenched the folder so tightly that it bent. Why had that memory even resurfaced? Was something as simple as thinking about a _flashlight_ enough to… to…?

Chell blinked, momentarily taken aback. The folder she'd been carrying had been flung onto the ground, thrown wide open, with the papers that made up its contents scattered around it. Next she came to notice that she had slipped into an attack pose and was breathing heavily.

She calmed her breathing, irritation at herself (and at the old emotions dredged up by the memories) stewing in her gut. _Not again_.

Slowly she picked up the folder, shuffling the papers back together and sliding them back into the flimsy cardstock pockets.

A year after being released from… _That Place_… and she still couldn't control the occasional bouts of rage that rose up unbidden at the slightest provocation. Whatever she was holding, she either threw or broke.

Once the papers had all been collected she rested on her ankles and ran her hands over her face, her dark, silver-streaked hair falling forward in a curtain around her ears as she slowly shook her head from side to side. _This job… _It brought up too many memories that she would rather just forget.

She supposed she was lucky Membrane Labs had hired her, though. With her meager skill set, which basically consisted of jumping and the ability to fire a portal gun with marked precision, she wasn't sure what else she could do.

Chell had only met the CEO of Membrane Labs (its namesake Professor Membrane) once, when she had first started working there. Around that time she'd wondered what his first name was, since it was never mentioned. Then one of her co-workers had assured her that Membrane _was_ his first name, and no one seemed to know what his surname was. Strange that two famous and influential scientists, Professor Membrane and Cave Johnson, had unusual nouns for first names.

At last she dragged herself out of her thoughts, tucked her folder under one arm again, and stood once more. It was still a long way back to her apartment.

Her head dipped forward slightly at the thought that she probably needed a car. Needed one, but didn't particularly want one. Her own two legs had never failed her before and she didn't much like the idea of depending on a clunky metal box with wheels to get her where she needed to go. The thought of driving just seemed _wrong_, somehow.

But of course, maybe that was exactly why she should do it. The corner of her mouth twisted up in a wry, half-hearted smile.

After another half hour of walking she finally made it back to her apartment complex, letting out her customary little ashamed sigh when she caught sight of the state of the place.

Life had not been kind to Chell since she had left _That Place_. Living in the rattiest apartments in town, earning very little money by doing the one thing she knew but hated… Still. Chell took a deep breath and let it out slowly. The air smelled thick and disgusting, but on the plus side it lacked the pristine, chemical scent of the test chambers she had been forced to run for so long. It was another sign that, against all odds, she was _free_.

Chell made her way up the stairs to her own apartment, walking with a slight but noticeable limp. She still wasn't sure where exactly she had gotten it. It could have been from any number of things that had happened to her at the Facility; after all, she still had received little to no medical attention for any of it. If she ever encountered some sort of problem, she simply pushed past it until it went away on its own—just as she had been accustomed to doing ever since she had first woken up in a small glass room with barely any idea of where she was. The limp had been there for almost the entire year she'd been free, though. That was stupid.

She had hardly set foot in the apartment when the phone on the wall rang. Chell closed and locked the door, dropping her folder on the card table where she usually sat to eat, but didn't bother to kick off her shoes before picking up the phone.

"Chell?" a tight male voice asked. It was Mr. Simmons, right hand man to Professor Membrane. "I'm calling to tell you that we need those calculations by tomorrow. We're inches away from finishing the project but there's always something wrong with the numbers you give us. Why were you so _insistent_ on working on this if you barely know what you're doing? We can't even afford to switch you with someone else now! We're too close!"

Chell offered no response and her face remained stoic.

Mr. Simmons grunted. "Get those numbers in by tomorrow, and make sure they're _right_, or I'm sorry, we're going to have to fire you. We'll just have to deal with the setbacks." He hung up.

Sighing, Chell lowered the phone onto the table. They had been threatening to fire her for months. Nothing had been done yet.

She hung the phone back on its receiver and went into the kitchen, setting a pot of water on the stove to boil. Then she sat down at the table and rested her gaze on the folder.

'Artificial Intelligence Experiment 238:** Sentience!'**

The last word was in bold, a larger font, and was followed by a plethora of exclamation points. Chell couldn't exactly say she shared in its optimism. She flipped open the folder, closely examining her notes on the calculations and formulas needed for the newest experiment on sentient artificial intelligence. As far as she could tell they were quite good. Very accurate.

Fortunately, Chell was highly skilled in the art of breaking things.

* * *

The house phone was ringing off the hook, actually rattling in its receiver on the table. Eventually the Computer got fed up enough with the noise that it alerted Zim, who threw on his disguise in his underground base and allowed an elevator to take him to the surface.

The phone _never_ rang this incessantly, not unless GIR had kept a rented movie for weeks past its due date again. Perplexed, Zim picked it up. "Hello?"

The excited person on the other end started babbling immediately. "Listen, I know where those space probes came from—!"

"How did _you_ get my phone number, _Dib-filth?!_" Zim snarled into the phone, balking at the familiar voice.

"Keef gave it to me. I guess you must've given it to him when you were doing that stupid friend thing," Dib replied.

Keef? Zim made a mental note to take care of that carrot-haired human's memory later.

"Look, Zim, I wanted to let you know that I got the other core working today and it told me where they came from. Have you ever heard of—?"

"NO! What space probes? Don't call me, _human_. Your voice is stupid."

"The space probes I brought to your doorstep last night!" Dib reminded him. "The ones you said would explode in my face? They're actually called cores. Turns out they're from a science facility called Aperture Laboratories. Have you heard of it?"

"Why would_ I_ have heard of it?" Zim snapped.

Dib sighed. "I called you as a last resort," he admitted. "The facility has a webpage, but the entire thing's been wiped. The only other thing I could find was a news article saying it had been gassed, everyone in it died, and the entire place caved in. I asked around my paranormal forums to see if anyone knew anything about it other than that but they didn't."

"Why do you insist on boring me to death with your drivel?" Zim asked, his eyelids drooping.

Dib just raised his voice slightly. "Think about those two cores I found! They were up in space but they clearly weren't made for it, and they came from that facility—even though everyone's supposed to be dead! I'd say it's all really suspicious, wouldn't you? And they're some of the most advanced technology I've ever seen!"

That caught Zim's attention. "What? Nonsense!"

"They're sentient!" the human said excitedly. "Much more sentient than your stupid robots, even. I've never seen anything like it!"

Zim paused. "And, they came from… where, again?"

"Never mind about that. Since you don't know anything, I'm gonna go try to—"

"Give me one!" Zim commanded.

Dib stopped talking for a moment, taken aback. "What?"

"Give me the space probes!" Zim said. "Let's see how 'advanced' they are when they're disassembled in a scrap heap."

"_What? _I'm not—"

"_GIR's _advanced," Zim said with more than a hint of pride. "There's no way your stolen robots are anywhere near his caliber."

"Forget it, Zim." Dib hung up without so much as a farewell taunt. Zim glowered at the phone still clenched in his hand, and then slammed it on the receiver.

Once again the human had _no idea_ whom he was dealing with.

* * *

Dib put the phone back on its receiver, chewing the inside of his cheek. Any sort of information about this science facility was proving difficult to unearth, but of course that just made him more determined. He turned off the TV—which was playing some sort of special on sentient clouds instead of the new Mysterious Mysteries episode he'd been promised—and climbed back upstairs.

It was getting late again. With a sigh he entered his room, ready to go to bed. However as soon as he entered he quickly realized that unless he wanted to go the night without any sleep, he'd have to put both cores somewhere outside his room until morning. Either that or find some heavy-duty earplugs.

"All I'm saying is that there is _clearly_ something wrong with the sky here," Wheatley was declaring from his spot on the desk, where Dib had set him back down after their return inside. At Dib's arrival the core looked up. "Oh! Good! I wanted to ask you about the sky. Did you see it, earlier? Did you _see_ it? Brown! The sky was _brown!_ What kind of bizarre weather pattern is that supposed to signify, anyway? Rain? …Mud? Raining mud? Didn't know that was possible, pretty sure it's not. But I mean the sky is supposed to be _blue_. Everything I've ever read says the sky is blue."

"STARS!" the yellow-eyed Space Core squealed next to him, catching sight of the night sky outside Dib's window. "I SEE STARS!"

"I think your sky is broken, mate. Someone should really check up on that. You should get a man in. In my opinion."

Dib massaged under his eye with his fingertips. "Look, I'm going to put you both out in the hall for the night, okay?"

Wheatley swiveled to face him, optic wide in surprise. "What? The hall? Wait, what's wrong with your—" He cut himself off as Dib hoisted him up by the handles and walked to the doorway, setting him on the floor outside his room. He then followed suit with the Space Core, putting him next to Wheatley. As soon as both cores were out of his room he closed his door again.

He sighed. All right, so maybe it was a little cruel, but he knew he needed the quiet. He wasn't used to people making conversation with him at the best of times, let alone while he was trying to sleep. He'd visit with the cores again in the morning. Maybe he'd even manage to get some more information out of them. In fact, he'd gotten an idea for how that might be accomplished.

* * *

For a moment, the hallway was silent, the only light being the strange mixed glow put off by the cores' respective stratosphere-blue and gold optics.

Wheatley blinked. "…Oh." He stared at the bedroom door, then rolled his optic about in his casing as he scanned up and down the hallway. "All- all right, then. This is as nice a place as any, I suppose. In the dark hallway of a strange building. At night. In the dark. Alone. Well, except for you, obviously." He cast the Space Core a quick glance, then his vision flicked back to the closed door. "He probably wants to go into, ah, sleep mode—sleep, just regular sleep, I mean—and- and, er, didn't want us to keep him up. Humans are sort of sensitive about that kind of thing, I think. That's the- that's the only reason he put us out here, obviously."

"Hey," Spacey said, rocking back and forth as he waggled his handlebars and glanced at Wheatley. "Hey."

"Yes?" Wheatley asked, a bit uncertainly.

The Space Core blinked, his lower optic shield pulled up in a bright smile. "Are we going back to space?"

Wheatley shivered. "I bloody well _hope _not, mate."

Suddenly he quailed and the aperture of his optic contracted tightly. What if this new human—Dib—what if he _did _send them back into space? What if he did something _worse?_ Like… like… What if he sent them back to the _Facility?_

Wheatley huddled into his casing, blinking rapidly and simulating heavy breathing. Would he do that? No, no, of course he—_what if he was in league with _Her? Why else would he toss them out in the hallway to fend for themselves? His vocal synthesizer rasped out a choked, garbled croak at the thought.

When Wheatley had been falling from space, he'd been absolutely sure that _She_ was the one behind it. He'd all but given up, right then and there, knowing that if the mistress of the Facility was controlling his downward plunge then he had no way, _no way_ to avoid whatever fate was awaiting him. But then when he had come back online just a few hours earlier, he'd found himself somewhere else entirely: a human's bedroom. Just a plain, normal, everyday human's bedroom (presumably, as he'd never actually visited one before today).

It seemed he had been wrong about _Her_. And it seemed there was still a small spark of hope left, after all. A slightly bigger spark now, actually, given that he was no longer incapacitated in space. Maybe this human could help him somehow. If Wheatley could trust him, of course. _Okay, I'll come up with a quick test_, he thought. The moment the word crossed his mind he flinched. _Sorry, experiment. Let's say experiment. Right. If this human DOES NOT send us back to space or back to the Facility, then he's on our side. No doubt about it. I can tell him all about everything. At some point. Possibly. But, um, the other hand- on the other hand, if he _does_ send us to space or to, to the—back There, then um… he is clearly _not_ on our side, and I'll… Well, in that scenario there isn't really much I could do except… er… nothing._

He sincerely hoped Dib wouldn't send them off anywhere.

_But your track record with humans hasn't been all that fantastic so far, mate_, a snide little voice on the very edge of his processor said. _Him earning your trust is all well and good, but how the bloody heck do you expect to earn _his_ trust? What happens when he finds out what happened to all the others? You've killed how many humans, ten thousand and six? Ten thousand and seven by now, probably. There's no way that lady could've survived testing this long_.

_Shut up!_ Wheatley thought furiously, shoving the unwanted comments away from the forefront of his mind. He'd do better this time, he would, he'd make sure of it. He was out of _That Place_ now, he was away from _Her_, away from the poisonous mainframe—_But you're not away from yourself. Those things didn't cause your monstrous behavior back at Aperture so it doesn't even matter that they're out of the equation now, does it? That was ALL YOU, and you know it._

_I said shut up!_ Wheatley wailed in his mind, spinning wildly in his casing. "It's not my fault! That was _not_ my fault. That was the bloody awful body I was in and that blasted Itch, nothing else! All right? I didn't even know what I was doing half the time and—" _That's a lie_. "—Well who asked you, anyway?! And I never would've done it if the mainframe hadn't—" _Are you _sure? "I mean, I—_agh_, why can't I—"

"_Hey_."

The tone of that single syllable was so cold and hostile that Wheatley froze completely, one hundred percent certain for a split second that _She_ had actually found him at last. Slowly he rotated his inner casing to face in the direction of the voice, his optic a mere pinprick of faint blue light.

A girl was standing there. She squinted down at Wheatley, her eyes narrowed so far that he couldn't even make out the whites; they along with most of the rest of her face were nothing more than black shadowy pits, somehow even darker than the surrounding gloom of the hallway. She was wearing an outfit that seemed to be all one piece—with even her hands and feet covered—and had a zipper down the front. Two small bat-like wings protruded from her back and Wheatley honestly wasn't sure if they were just part of the outfit or if they were actually attached to the girl herself.

"…Er, hello," Wheatley managed to say. He tried to recall who this person was but was ninety-five percent sure he'd never seen her before.

The girl glared down at him, opening one eye wide enough that in the dim light he could see an amber iris, the same color as Dib's. "I don't know what you are," she said in a slow, even tone, "but you're talking so much that I can't _sleep_."

"Um. Er, sorry, um, Luv." Wheatley silently begged Spacey to do something but their radio connection was badly damaged and apparently he hadn't picked up the art of telepathy, because the yellow-eyed core continued to twitch and babble about nothing but space-related paraphernalia. "I was just… talking to myself, there. Bit stupid, really, but I do that on occasion, and I'm really sorry I disturbed you… um whoever… you… are." He shivered. Something about this girl scared him out of his circuitry.

The girl just grunted and closed her eye again. "You're one of _Dib's_ things, aren't you? I saw him carrying around you stupid spheres all day and trying to tell Dad how you're so intelligent."

"Intelligent?" Wheatley perked up somewhat, awe spreading through his processor. _Intelligent?_ Someone—a _human_—had been trying to prove he was _intelligent?_

"Just stop making noise," the girl said, turning away. "Or I'll throw both of you out in the yard. It's supposed to rain tonight." With that, she turned, making her way silently back down the hall and into a different room. The door closed with a soft _click_.

Wheatley hunkered down in his casing and turned to the core next to him. "Right… you heard 'er, Spacey. No noise. Absolutely no noise, one hundred percent silence. All the time. Silence. Otherwise we'll end up out in the rain, which does not sound ideal, or… or we'll end up somewhere worse. Back _There_, maybe."

"Space?" the yellow core piped up instantly.

"No, the _other _'There.' The Facility."

"_QUIET!_" the girl shouted from her room, and Wheatley immediately fell silent.

It was going to be a long night.

* * *

Morning sunlight filtered in through the circular windows above Dib's bed as he knelt in front of his closet, rummaging around in an old cardboard box.

"All right, this is the cord with the closest matching plug I can find," Dib said at last, standing back up with a long black cable coiled in his arms. He put the box back away and closed the closet again. "It _should_ work, but it might be a little glitchy." He unraveled the cord, plugging one end into one of his dad's ancient USB adaptors and in turn fitting that into his computer. He held the other end of the cord up to show Wheatley. "Okay. Ready?"

The core's upper lid drooped and he gave Dib an uneasy look. "Having second thoughts about this, actually. Never been plugged into an actual… _computer _computer like that before. I mean who knows, it might have some sort of virus that affects robots, too. But um… As- as long as I don't have to_ talk_ about the Facility…"

Dib gave a brisk nod, swiveling the core around on the desk. "All right, let's find out about this horrible science facility of yours."

Wheatley craned his optic to try to see behind him while Dib examined the three small prongs on his back port. When he clipped the end of the plug into the port Wheatley gave a violent jerk, yelping. Dib released the plug immediately.

"What happened?" he asked.

"Nothing! Nothing," Wheatley said hurriedly. "I'm fine. Just surprised me is all." Dib rotated Wheatley back around to face him, sat down in his desk chair, and then turned his attention to the computer. Text started flickering up on the monitor:

_/New device detected_

_/Origin unknown_

_/Scanning for origin… Processing…_

_/Mark IV Personality Construct copyright Aperture Laboratories 199_ error data corrupt_

_/Open connection with device y/n_

"What's it doing?" Wheatley asked, shuffling his handles to try to face the screen. Dib turned him towards the monitor, making sure the cable remained secure. He punched the 'y' key and the text on the screen vanished. Despite having Wheatley plugged in, everything on the screen still looked the same. Maybe there was something wrong with the—

The screen went dark.

"Oh. It's black," Wheatley said after a pause. "Do I, er… Should I try to hack it?"

"No, hang on," Dib said. He pressed a few buttons on the keyboard but it didn't affect anything. Maybe Wheatley _should_ try to "hack" it, although… That seemed kind of like a bad idea. "Can you access anything?" he asked hesitantly, turning his head to the robot. Wheatley's optic shutters narrowed in a squint at the screen.

"Yeah… yes, I think I—Let's try this…"

There were a few beeps and the monitor flared up with a bright image of a white background featuring a black, circular, shuttered logo exactly like the ones etched underneath the optics of the two cores. The black logo faded to a muted gray and more text blossomed into existence in front of it.

**Welcome, Aperture Science personnel, to the automatic AI inspection server! This server will inspect your Aperture Science Personality Construct for any circuitry damage or corruption. To access, please sign in.**

**Username:**

**Password:**

"Inspection server?" Wheatley said. "Never heard of that before. Must be new. Oh, also, that does _not_ look good. Username _and_ password. Nasty. Not sure I can hack that, y'know, both of those at the same time. Little bit tricky."

"Hang on," Dib mumbled. Why was Wheatley so bent on hacking things? Dib moused over to the bottom of the screen where a tiny link labeled 'Create New' could barely be seen, and clicked it.

**Hello, and welcome, new faculty member of Aperture Laboratories! Welcome to the wonderful world of SCIENCE! You are about to embark on a fantastic journey of testing, data, experiments, and more testing. Create your personal account here. (note: all Aperture Science employee accounts will be closely inspected five times a day at random and unposted times.)**

***Username:**

**Password:**

**Confirm password:**

***Full name:**

**Email:**

***Social security number:**

**Birth date:**

***Mother's maiden name:**

***Allergies (and severity of said allergies):**

***Address:**

***Close family/friends:**

***Elementary and middle school GPA (if applicable):**

***High school GPA:**

***College degree and GPA:**

***Awards won:**

***Experiences with SCIENCE:**

***required field**

**Thank you for helping us help you help us all. :)**

**Note: If this is Greg and you just forgot your password again, you're fired.**

"Or you could fill out one of those things," Wheatley said. "Careful, though, it says they check it five times a day. May catch on or something."

"Everyone who worked there died," Dib reminded him. He quickly filled in the form and hit enter, then typed in a few commands.

The screen fizzled out to be replaced by pages and pages of scrolling code of which Dib could only decipher a fraction. Names scrolled up, too, along with their birthdates—no, _death dates_… 'ASHPD test 18,' 'ASHPD test 25,' and so on. Some—no, he realized again, most—weren't even named and just labeled along the lines of 'Test subject 00054.' Dib began to feel a bit queasy.

"'Test subject'?" He cast a cursory glance at Wheatley.

"Oh, yeah, there used to be loads of them," the core replied nonchalantly. "They were all sort of sealed away when _She_ was shut down and uh…" He stumbled over his words. "Well, long story short, they all died… most of 'em."

Dib's eyes widened as he watched the scrolling names. There were so _many _of them…

He'd had enough. Quickly he typed in the first command he could think of and let the screen change to something else.

"Okay, I'm going to look up everything I can about Aperture Science," he said to Wheatley. "Try not to—"

The screen changed. It was replaced by a jittering scene, tinted blue, of some sort of shady hallway. The viewpoint shifted from wall to wall as if whatever this image had come from was looking around, then it cut to black and came into view again like a blink. It went up to a door and then rammed into it repeatedly, creating a knocking sound.

"Hello? Anyone in there? Hellloooo?" Wheatley's voice called, but it was coming from the computer rather than the robot himself. The real Wheatley's eye widened as the recording continued. "Are you going to open the door? At any time?"

"Oh! I think it's playing one of my memory files!" he said. "You don't have to- you don't have to _watch_ those—"

The scene changed in a short fit of static. There was more rolling along above an empty hallway, absolutely no one around—then a black, sparking podium that looked like it should be holding something—then falling—travelling along catwalks, suspended in the air by arcs of electricity fizzing from a white gun that a woman held poised in her arms—a giant, white and black, bulky _thing_ with what looked like a yellow optic, which never turned to look at the screen—then flashes of static and vibrant colors and then black—

At the sight of the memory on the screen, Wheatley shuddered and pulled into his casing.

The scenes began progressing more rapidly, so fast that Dib couldn't keep up with them. There were more flashes—a bright white light—a woman in an elevator rising off the floor—shattered glass everywhere—white robots being shoved together with giant bulky cubes—an array of flat panels with spikes on the bottom, surrounding a woman standing alone on a platform—fast, confusing images of a wide room with blue, orange, and white paint splattered across the floor—blackness, stars, the craggy white surface of the moon, _space_—

"All right, all right, stop! STOP!" Wheatley cried, wincing away from the screen. "I think you've got enough information now, haven't you? More than enough, definitely, so just—" he glanced at the screen, closed his optic again, and looked away. "—Just turn it _off_. Please."

"Are you sure?" Dib asked. "Can't we just—?" When Wheatley didn't respond, he pulled out the cord attaching the core to the computer and the memories flashing across the screen shut off at once.

Wheatley simulated a long, relieved sigh. "That's better. Much better. Thank you."

Glancing at the blank computer again, Dib's brow furrowed. "Bad memories?"

"You could say that," Wheatley replied, his eye downcast. "Not anything that needs to be worried about, though, haha!" He attempted one of the most unconvincing laughs that Dib had ever heard. "I've put it _all_ behind me. All of it."

Dib took a long, deep breath. "Wheatley," he said evenly, "what _exactly _happened at Aperture Laboratories?"

* * *

"Professor Membrane, Sir—" A man poked his head into the room but stopped abruptly when his eyes fell on the only occupant. "…Oh, sorry. Do you know where Membrane is?"

Chell, sitting at a table at Membrane Labs where she was been rewiring a couple of electrical components, looked up. She dusted off her hands and stood with a shake of her head.

The man gave her an odd look before realization crossed his face. "Oh! You're the one that doesn't talk much." He looked down at the enormous stack of papers in his arms and bit his lip. "Hey, are you busy?"

Chell nodded.

"Good, good, I need a little help." The man, apparently having ignored her response, walked forward and dumped the papers into Chell's arms. "Can you do me a favor and hand these off to the professor? I have _got_ to get back to work."

Without waiting for Chell to accept or deny the request, he turned and left. Chell narrowed her eyes at the space where he had gone. Well, she supposed she wasn't _that_ busy. Also, it might be good to meet the "great" Professor Membrane again. She'd remember this, though, if that man ever asked her for another favor. She frowned as she left the room.

The professor could be anywhere. He hated the idea of working behind a desk—she wasn't sure if he even had an office. He wanted to be in the thick of things, working hard on some new invention or innovation and almost completely disregarding the existence of the entire rest of the staff in his fervor to create SCIENCE (oh how she hated that word). He was almost always at the lab, too, and Chell had heard from someone that he wasn't married but had two kids. How did he even take care of them?

But of course that wasn't actually her business (not that staying out of other people's business had ever bothered her before). She pushed her ponderings aside and turned her attention back to the task at hand—finding Mr. Membrane.

At last she heard his jovial, booming voice from down the hall and hurried to the closed door that led to it. She was just about to swing it open when she caught some of the words being spoken and paused with her hand hovering in front of the handle, wondering how long she could get away with eavesdropping.

"Not now, Son!" the professor was saying. "You told me about those robots yesterday, and I've told you that artificial sentience is not currently possible! I am extremely busy today. We'll have to talk later."

"But Dad—" a boy's voice said. Either he was in the room with his father or Chell was overhearing a video call. "This is important! Well, everything I tell you about is important, but this is even more so! It's about a corrupt science facility! Remember the one that was gassed? You showed me the article about it years ago."

Chell's hand lowered and her heart thudded faster, her gaze drifting up along the door and a shadow of horror flickering across her face. She struggled to calm herself down. There were lots of science facilities. The boy couldn't possibly mean—

"Dad, will you just listen?" the boy said in an almost exasperated tone. "This place has human test subjects and according to one of the robots I found, there's still one in there, and if someone doesn't get her out then she'll be_ killed_. Here, Wheatley'll tell you! Go on, Wheatley."

Chell's entire body froze. Her wide-eyed stare at the door became hardened and focused as if her gaze was capable of burning a hole through the wood. _No._

She should leave. She should just back away, _run_, never look back, she didn't have to stay here—

A third voice spoke. "It's true! What he's- what he's tellin' you. It's all true."

The entire stack of papers cascaded out of Chell's arms, hitting the floor with a _whump_.

"That sounded like important documents being dropped!" Professor Membrane said. "We'll talk later, Son."

"_Dad!_" the boy's voice took on a pleading tone but was cut off. On a reflex, Chell grabbed the door handle and flung it open, stumbling into the room and taking it in with wild eyes. She found herself face-to-face with none other than Professor Membrane, who was turning around to open the door himself. In front of him hovered a floating screen—blank, now, but she was sure that a moment ago it had displayed the image of Membrane's son… and, unless her ears had deceived her, that… _core_.

Professor Membrane looked down at the pile of scattered papers in the hall in what she assumed to be dismay. "Oh, I see! They're only more fan letters. Send them off to Simmons, would you? He'll answer them for me."

The Professor walked briskly into the hall, sidestepped the papers without breaking stride, and marched off. He didn't even usher Chell out of the room.

Chell's harried look dissolved into her familiar stoic expression. Mechanically she walked back into the hallway and pulled the multitude of fan letters back into some semblance of a stack, wedging her fingers underneath it and lifting it back up. She stood for a long moment with her cold, calculating gaze resting on the screen. Then she turned on her heel and strode away from the door, drawn up to her full height and staring straight ahead down the hall with steely eyes.

It was a look she was accustomed to wearing and she wore it well. It was a look of pure determination.


	7. Zim Comes Crashing In

"It was a nice try, I'll give it that. Y'know some people just don't listen, no matter what you say. I know from experience."

There was a sigh. "But this was _important_. You said yourself that someone was trapped in there."

"Well—yes. But, look, 'm just trying to lift your spirits a little. It's not the end of the world, really. Just try again later! Although it- it _would_ be nice if he believed you, and soon, so we could y'know work at getting her out of there."

Gaz shifted in her position on the couch, curling her legs closer to her body. Without looking up she allowed her attention to stray from the game clutched in her hands, which was currently stuck on an insanely long loading screen anyway, to the two annoying voices that carried down from upstairs.

"So what now?" That was the dumb, blue-eyed robotic sphere speaking.

"I did have another idea," Dib replied. The voices were growing closer so Gaz assumed they were making their way toward the stairs. "I'm going to bring you and the Space Core right to Dad's lab. Once he actually sees you, he's _gotta _believe me!"

Gaz snorted. _Yeah, good luck with that one, Dib._

"Why've you got that cord?" the sphere suddenly demanded, its tone accusatory. "If you're thinking of plugging me back into your computer, that is a big 'no,' mate."

Out of the corner of her eye she saw Dib appear on the stairs with a black cable and the robot clutched in his arms. He took that thing everywhere he _went_ these days. Maybe he'd found a kindred spirit in the talkative idiot.

"Not _my _computer again, but—" Dib cut himself off. "Oh, hi, Gaz."

"Going somewhere?" Gaz asked, still keeping her eyes glued to her screen.

"Dad's lab," Dib replied, setting the blue-eyed sphere down on the coffee table in front of the couch. He said to it, "Wait here. I'll go get Spacey."

"Dunno what you'd need him for, but all right," the sphere said. Dib dropped the black cable he'd been holding onto the table as well and then hurried back upstairs. Gaz raised her eyes slightly, one eyebrow cocking up as she regarded the robot. It was pointedly not looking at her. She kept her gaze locked on it. Eventually its optic sneaked to the side to look over at her; as soon as it caught sight of her looking at it, the blue light shrunk and whipped away again. Gaz allowed herself a silent smirk.

"SPACE! SpacesspacespaceWE'RE GOING BACK TO SPACE—!"

…Which immediately turned into a wince at the assault on her eardrums. She turned to look at what Dib was dragging down the stairs this time. It was the other robot, the one with the yellow eye. Apparently it was even chattier than the blue-eyed sphere. Also, apparently it only liked to talk about one thing.

"See, he's more of a hindrance than a help, really," the sphere on the table piped up when it caught sight of Dib. "But if you really wanna bring him along, more power to you, I mean…"

Dib set down the yellow-eyed sphere next to the one with the blue eye, going to the garage door and pulling out the dirty old wheelbarrow he kept in there. He pushed it right through the living room, leaving streaks of dirt on the carpet, and loaded the two spheres into it as well as the black cord. They sat on top of a short stack of things that resembled books.

"I'll see you in a while, Gaz," Dib said, turning and rolling the wheelbarrow back to the garage. "Don't delete the Mysterious Mysteries episode I recorded last night!"

"Okay, really, what're we doing?" the blue-eyed sphere asked with a hint of nervousness in its oddly British-sounding voice.

"Well, you can interfere with electronic equipment," Dib mused aloud to the it. "And I'm guessing Spacey can, too. If I hook you guys up to Dad's computer, maybe he'll be more likely to believe me about you. You might even be able to help him with his experiments!"

* * *

Dib pulled up short in front of the entrance to Membrane Labs, finding himself directly in front of a guard gripping a spear that had electricity dancing around the pointed tip. "I'm here to see my dad," Dib said.

The guard jabbed his finger to a sign on the wall. "Can't you read? No public admittance today!"

His mouth gaping open, Dib stared. "But I'm not the public! I'm Professor Membrane's _son!_"

The man stalked forward and brandished the electric spear. "Beat it, kid!"

Dib knew firsthand what it was like to be on the receiving end of one of those spears. His brow furrowed in an angry glare but he took hold of the wheelbarrow again and backed away a little. "I walked all the way across town to get here! With a wheelbarrow full of robots! Can't Dad just spare five minutes for me to tell him something? There's a life on the line!"

"I said _beat it!_" The man rushed forward and Dib jumped, wheeled around, and ran off as fast as he could with the wheelbarrow. When he was some distance away he jerked to a stop and looked back. The guard had returned to his post and was greeting a dark-haired woman that had emerged from the building. She barely responded, just waving him off before marching off down the sidewalk with her back to them.

"SPACE LADY!" the Space Core shouted. Dib cast him an odd glance—man, this thing was even weirder than Zim's evil robot minion.

"Rude," Wheatley said, his upper optic shutter lowered in a frown at the guard. "He didn't have to go chasin' us off."

"How am I supposed to get Dad to believe me about this?!" Dib demanded of no one in particular, throwing his arms out. "If he won't listen to me then we'll have a lot more trouble helping that friend of yours!" He planted his hands on his hips and glared at the laboratory.

"Space," the Space Core added helpfully.

Dib just picked up the end of the wheelbarrow and turned away, plodding along back toward his house. He'd come all this way for nothing—but, then, what had he really expected?

"What are these things, anyway?" Wheatley asked out of the blue.

Dib blinked. "What?"

"These book things we're sitting on." Wheatley tapped his lower handlebar on the cover of the spelldrive on which he was sitting atop. "What are they?"

"Spelldrives," Dib replied with a shrug. "They're like laptops with spells in them, but I can't use any of them. They're all powerless."

There was a pause as he walked. Then, Wheatley spoke up, "Well… you've got that cable, haven't you? Maybe I could—you know, maybe I could try hacking one of them. See if I could get it working for you."

Dib stopped. "You'd do that?"

"Well, er, sure!" Wheatley said, optic pulling into a smile. "I wouldn't mind taking a crack at it. Might be fun."

That was something Dib had never even considered. He'd only brought the spelldrives along because he hadn't taken the time to remove them from the wheelbarrow before rushing off with the cores to show them to his dad. Slowly, a grin spread across his face and he changed direction, heading toward Mystical Hill.

* * *

"So. Spelldrives," Wheatley said. His voice jittered and bounced with the rattling of the wheelbarrow over the grass. "Sounds intimidating, I'll be honest. _Spelldrive_. Unless it's actually just a spell checker or something. Somewhat anticlimactic."

"No, I told you, they cast spells," Dib corrected.

"Did you say space?" Spacey, perched next to Wheatley, piped up.

Wheatley rolled his optic. "He said 'spells,' mate. Not 'space.' They don't sound _remotely_ the same. Well, maybe a _little_, they've both got the 'sp' sound at the beginning, then the 'sss' sound at the end, so I guess I can _sort _of see where you're coming from, but that's not the point."

Dib stopped and unloaded the two cores along with the three so-called "spelldrives" he'd brought, setting the lot of them down in the grass. He sat sown and pulled the nearest drive over to him, flipping it open like a laptop. "Okay. I'll plug you in, and you try to restore the drives' powerpoints. Remember that—powerpoints. Ready?"

Wheatley's frame shuddered, his upper optic drooping and his face dipping down. "As long as it doesn't try and dig through my memories. Horrible."

Dib took the black cable he had used before and plugged one end into a rectangular port in the spelldrive, clipping the other end into the port in Wheatley's back. The connection opened immediately and Wheatley felt something stir on the other end of the line. He gave a start. There was something familiar about the motion. It was just like what he had felt when plugged into a receptacle in the facility. Was- was this thing _sentient?_

"'Ello? Anyone there?" he called out hopefully.

The electronic conscious of the spelldrive shifted again.

_[Unknown presence detected]_. The message popped silently into Wheatley's mind from the drive.

"Oh, hello! You _can _hear me!" he said. "And—oh, you're talking about—I'm the unknown presence. Ah. Don't worry, I'm only here to ask a question. Simple question! Could you possibly—?"

_[Scanning for viruses]_

"What? I haven't got any!" Wheatley said indignantly. "Also, pretty sure the plural of virus is viri, by the way. Like octopus has octopi. And nucleus is nuclei. See? But you probably didn't know that, I'll give you that one."

_[Virus detected]_

_[Rebooting firewall…]_

_[Firewall at 87% efficiency]_

It was like someone wearing an enormous boot had decided it would be fun to give Wheatley a kick in the side port. He gasped, inner casing spinning, as the connection was forcibly slammed closed.

"Did it work?" Dib asked eagerly, scooting forward.

Wheatley righted himself and contracted his optic. "He said I've got a virus!" He said, outraged. "I haven't got a virus! Unless—ohhhh, it was that ornithophobic you said I had! That must be the virus it was talking about! That bird gave it to me, I'll bet. Dunno how but I hear they carry all sorts of diseases, maybe electronic ones as well."

Dib closed his eyes for a long moment and then reopened them. "Ornithophobia means you're _afraid _of _birds_."

"Er, that's not a virus," Wheatley said. Dib just shook his head and unplugged the closed-off spelldrive, pulling over another. He plugged it in and Wheatley waited for the connection to open.

All that came across was creepy music with extremely repetitive lyrics. _[Piggy piggy piggy piggy piggy piggy]_

"Errr… Hello?" Wheatley blinked twice.

_[Piggy piggy piggy piggy. Pork. Pork. Pork. Pork. Piggy piggy]_

"I… _think _this one is broken," Wheatley said to Dib. "It just keeps talking about pork."

The boy perked up in surprise. "Oh, that must be the one that leads to the Shadowhog dimension! I should set that one aside." He unplugged Wheatley once more, setting that drive a little ways away from the rest. "All right, last one."

Wheatley shifted the plates of his casing. "Gonna try a new tactic this time. Just let me at it!"

Dib plugged him, one last time, into the remaining spelldrive. Wheatley simulated taking in a deep breath.

"Rrrrright then. Time to put my master hacker skills to work. Um, again. Hallo!" he said cheerfully to the drive's mainframe. "Have to say, it's a pleasure to meet you, Drive number…" His gaze drifted to the number printed on the spelldrive's casing. "…Uh, 017. Lovely day we're having, too. Of course, you can only take my word for it, since I'm fairly certain you don't have any sort of visual sensors, but I can assure you that it is a lovely day."

_[Serial number, please.]_

Wheatey blinked. "Excuse me?"

_[Please state your serial number.]_

"Oh." Wheatley cast around in his memories, struggling to remember the number he'd been told long, long ago. "I'm, er… I'm… let's see here… From what I remember, there was a six. Definitely a six. And a four… 0… 6… 14. That's it! 0614. Call me Wheatley, though. Please. Numbers're too blinkin' hard to remember.

"Now, to the point of my little, er… meeting. With you," he continued. "I am the head of Spelldrive… Management—the _new_ head, mind—and it seems there's been a _slight_ misunderstanding. Y'see, this spelldrive is supposed to have…" He looked up at Dib, who held up three fingers. "…Three point powers. And, as you can probably tell, it actually has a grand total of zero. Bit of a problem. So, do you think you could maybe… remedy the problem? Else I'd have to report you to the ol' Spelldrive Management and trust me, mate, no one wants that. Least of all me."

_[Processing request… Error: Spelldrive Management does not exist.]_

"It's new," Wheatley said quickly. "Quite new! From after your time, probably. I'm not surprised you haven't heard of us, honestly. And we would _really_ appreciate it if you replaced some of those missing points—powerpoints—Otherwise I _will _be forced to report you. Literally no way around it, sorry."

_[Processing… Error. The _real_ head of Spelldrive Management just sent out an all-call warning about British impostors.]_

"_What?_" Wheatley spluttered. "How in the name of—Look, _I'm _the head of Management, all right? Not whoever it was just decided to give you a call! Joke's on him, too! I just made it all up! Why don't you call him back and tell him that? Hah!"

Dib looked down, massaging his forehead with the heel of his hand.

_[Gotcha. Try something else, hotshot_._]_

Wheatley narrowed his optic shields. "All right, fair enough, your razor-sharp intellect saw through my clever lies. Smug tone _not_ appreciated, mate. And—Could you stop laughing? Just for a minute? If Spelldrive Management _was_ a thing, I _would_ report you. Absolutely no qualms." He looped his optic in his casing. Dib was leaning back on his hands, giving Wheatley a cool and almost indifferent look. "Can you believe this guy?" Wheatley asked him. "Honestly." He sighed. "Look, I'm thinking we might've gotten off on the wrong foot, 017. Want to, ah, start over? Just between you and me, it would really mean a lot for you to replace those powerpoints. It would be a real benefit to society, I'm sure. Might even save people, who knows. Orphans! Just think about it, you replacing those powerpoints could save the orphans! And the whales! Orphan whales! If that's not a good cause, I honestly don't know what is. Seriously. Also, if you do this one teensy favor for me, I'd be sure to put in a good word for you."

_[Put in a good word to whom?]_

That was actually a pretty valid question. "The… other spelldrives?" Wheatley asked tentatively.

The spelldrive's mainframe seemed to give a sigh. _[Urgh… might as well. I'm not sure why I even bother anymore. Take your powerpoints, but don't ask again]_.

Wheatley blinked. "What—really? I can't believe that worked! Um, thanks!"

Dib scrambled up in shock. "It worked? It worked this time?"

In answer, three new powerpoints appeared on the screen, filling it to capacity. Dib jumped up in the air, a broad smile lighting up his entire face. "This is great! Oh _man_, which spell should we do first?"

Wheatley sifted through the spell files on the drive, hardly daring to believe their good fortune himself. None of the spells cost more than two powerpoints, but there were a lot of them. "Um… well, there's pyrokinesis, which sounds… disastrous, to say the least. Er, invisibility, but it _looks_ like you're only invisible as long as you close your eyes. Amazing dancing talent, this other one where you open your mouth and all that comes out is music… Isn't that exactly what singing is? Teleportation… Those all cost one powerpoint. And oh, enlarged head…" Wheatley glanced at Dib. "—Might want to stay away from that one."

Dib scowled but Wheatley wasn't entirely sure why. The boy shook off the expression a moment later, though. "Those all sound pretty interesting!" He crouched in front of the spelldrive's screen and scrolled through the list. But then he backed away, unplugging Wheatley and reaching for Spacey. "Now that we know it works, I want to try the other spelldrive again. This is where having two cores comes in handy."

He plugged Spacey into the drive that had rudely put up a firewall against Wheatley.

"Are you space?" the defunct core asked it immediately. Wheatley watched in curiosity—Spacey seemed to be doing much better with that drive than he had. A few utterances of "SPACE!" and soon enough, all three powerpoint spaces were filled.

"Hey, it worked!" Dib cheered, going through those spells as well. "These look like attack spells. Look, with this one I could shoot lasers from my eyes!"

"Sounds bloody dangerous," Wheatley said. He tried to imagine laser beams shooting from his own optic but quickly dismissed the thought.

"Yeah, it seems like it would be a little impractical," Dib agreed. "Oh, here's one that makes you a master of swordfighting! Man, too bad I don't have a sword."

Something on Dib's wrist bleeped. The boy pulled back the sleeve of his black coat to reveal a digital watch. He pressed a button on its side, and his eyebrows rose in surprise. "Gaz? What's wrong?"

"Zim's been hanging around the house." The bored voice of Dib's scary sister came from the watch. "I just thought you should know that he's been making really pathetic attempts to break in."

Dib jerked backwards. "Zim's trying to break in?!" He jumped to his feet, jerking the plug out of Spacey's port and slinging the yellow-eyed core into the wheelbarrow. "C'mon, we're going back home!" He picked up Wheatley and dropped him in as well, then levered up the wheelbarrow and ran back down the hill.

Wheatley glanced back at the three spelldrives that the boy had left simply lying there. "Er, aren't you going to…?"

They'd already turned a corner and the drives were out of sight. Wheatley glanced around uncertainly but didn't bring the topic up again, wondering what could possibly have caused so much alarm and, yet again, who in Science this "Zim" was.

They had just reached the house when Dib's watch beeped again.

"You can stop freaking out now. I chased him off," his sister said from it. "While you're here though you can order a pizza. Dad said I wasn't allowed to do that anymore."

Dib looked considerably more irritated when he entered the house.

* * *

The night came quickly. Outside, underneath Dib's window, a shadow moved. It peeled itself away from the side of the blocky house and looked upward, thin black antennae slicked back and moonlight glinting off compound, reddish-purple eyes that were narrowed in concentration.

"We gonna play a prank on Dib?" a voice screamed excitedly from right beside Zim's hearing organs.

Zim scowled and shoved his robotic minion away. "Silence, GIR!" he shouted. He looked up at the circular window high above again. "MiniMoose? What has the Dib done with those robots? Report!"

A small shape darted across the window and suddenly Zim found himself face-to-face with a little purple moose that hovered in front of him. He blinked and nearly took a step back, but didn't, instead staring the robot right in its mismatched eyes. "Well?"

"Nyeh!" the moose chirped.

Zim rubbed his chin in thought. "So the strange robots aren't in the Dib-human's room anymore. This'll be easy! Where'd he put them, anyway?"

"Nyeh."

"The hallway," Zim confirmed. He scuffed the toe of his boot on the ground, brow furrowed. "All right, we'll have to go through Dib's room after all. Using silence. And stealth! GIR, you go first."

"OKEE-DOKEE!" GIR screamed. Fiery jets spurted from the bottoms of his feet and he took off with a _whoosh_ toward Dib's window, crashing into the wall directly above it full-force and tumbling back to the ground with a screech.

Zim grimaced. "_Agh_. Never mind, GIR, _I'll_ go first." His antennae flicked and he turned to glare at his other minion. "MiniMoose, take me up!"

The moose-like robot obediently flew down, allowing Zim to grab him around the middle before lifting off again (with some amount of difficulty). Zim automatically kicked his legs out when they left the ground and struggled to keep a grip on the moose's slick plastic casing. "Mmf, slow down!" he snapped. The robot had begun to swerve a bit in his flight path due to Zim's jerky movements. MiniMoose made an apologetic squeak and righted himself, successfully pulling Zim close enough to Dib's window that he was able to drop down and grab onto the sill with his fingertips. Zim's claws slid from their sheathes and caught the windowsill, though they did not puncture the tips of his black gloves. His PAK legs sprang from his back and braced themselves on the wall to provide him with greater balance. At last he managed to scramble up onto the windowsill. He pushed the window open, tumbling into the human's room with a raucous clatter as his PAK legs were pulled in behind him, rattling against the window. The PAK legs retracted as soon as he landed and he lay still for a moment, listening intently for any sounds indicating that the human had awoken.

Dib merely groaned in his sleep and rolled onto his other side.

"Excellent!" Zim said, pulling himself to his feet. He turned back to the window, standing on tip-toe and waving out at GIR and MiniMoose. "Wait there, GIR! I'll find the robot spheres and throw them down to you!"

Without waiting to see if the SIR Unit responded, Zim crept across the room. It was still and silent and smelled like human sweat and old socks. Disgusting. He paused for a moment by Dib's desk, regarding the computer sitting on top. He reached over and tapped the mouse, causing the screen to light up as if waiting for him. It needed a username and password. Egh, if he had time he might mess with that later. Who knew how many incriminating pictures Dib had on that filthy machine?

Now was not the time for that, though. He slipped out the door and nearly tripped over the two spheres pushed against the wall outside.

The spheres fixed him with stares produced by blue and yellow optics; they both blinked several times, probably out of surprise at his sudden appearance. Zim let his arms fall to his sides and looked at them with his head cocked. There was nothing impressive about these robots _so_ far. Then again, when had human technology ever impressed him? Never. But still, he had to examine these. They were supposedly examples of some of the most advanced technology Earth had to offer. And besides, Dib had tried to keep him from them, further driving home the point that they were important. He _had_ to see what they were capable of.

"Hello." The voice, sounding exceedingly human, came from the sphere with the cracked blue optic. "Um, didn't see you come in. You live here too, I'm guessing? Under the bed or something? Because… I didn't see you before, and if you'd gone through this hallway I would definitely have seen you, probably, since I don't actually sleep. Unless you can walk on ceilings, or something, but- wait, what's wrong with your head? …Er, sorry, that was a bit insensitive—but seriously, what've you got—"

"Shut your noise tube!" Zim said, not bothering to consider that this phrase made even less sense than usual under the current circumstances. He glanced back and forth between the two cores. They were big, and he wasn't sure he could bring both of them. He'd have to grab one, toss it outside, and then come back for the other one. He reached down and took hold of the blue-eyed sphere by the handlebar protruding from the top of it, lifting it off the ground.

"Huh? Wait! What're you—" the sphere squawked, waggling its handlebars. "What're you doing? I was fine right there, right where I was, great, actually, um—where're you taking me?"

Zim pushed his way back into Dib's room and hurried over to the window, gritting his teeth to keep from dropping the sphere, whose struggles were growing increasingly frantic.

"Look, I don't even know who you are! Did that human tell you to—?" The sphere's optic shields pulled back, leaving its eye wide. "Oh! _Oh_, this is… I know what this is, you're _kidnapping _me! I'm being kidnapped! I…" The sphere darted its optic back and forth before coming to rest on the sleeping form of Dib. "HEY! OI! Look over here! HELP!"

The round window was one of those stupid ones that swiveled on an axis in the center, so even when opened all the way the middle of the opening was blocked and there was no way a sphere only slightly smaller than the diameter of the window would fit through. Zim dropped the sphere to the floor and set about removing the window from its frame.

"There's someone in here!" the sphere continued to yell at Dib, its voice going up several pitches. "In here, there's some random bloke in your room, mate, _and he's trying to confiscate me without your permission_, and, apparently, _knowledge_, because you're _still asleep!_ I know humans love their sleep and all but—look, you need to wake up! Just wake up! Now! Help me!"

Zim clenched and unclenched his left fist as he worked, antennae erect and poised to pick up the slightest sound or movement from where Dib was sleeping. Dib muttered something; Zim glanced over and saw the human's eyelids flicker. They needed to get out of here _now_. Why wasn't this _working?!_

At last the clasps on the window popped open and the circular pane spun, fell through the opening, and shattered in the grass two floors below. Zim picked up the annoying sphere and attempted to shove it through the window as well, but the robot spread its handlebars wide and locked them into place so it wouldn't fit through the hole.

"MATE! HEY! DIB! DIB! _HELP!_" the sphere screamed.

"Dib! Make your stupid robots shut up!" a female voice shouted from outside the room. At her words Dib's eyes flew open and Zim knew he had only milliseconds before he was discovered. He twisted the sphere over and pushed it out the window handlebars-first, causing streaks to be torn in the paint of the window's frame. Zim dropped the sphere before diving through the window himself.

MiniMoose darted up to catch him and he hit the robot with a jolt in his abdomen, slid off to land in the yard on his feet, and ran into the shadows just before DIb appeared at the window and looked down in complete confusion. The human vanished seconds afterward.

"What are you trying to gain from kidnapping me, anyway, hey?" someone asked. Zim looked toward the voice. GIR was standing nearby, his metal hands clasped over the blue-eyed sphere. The sphere's optic had shrunk to a blue point and was whipping around in a panic. "I am a master hacker, true, true, but- but you can't make me hack anything! I won't cooperate! I won't! Haha! That's what you get for grabbing me and throwing me out a window! Yes, haha! Nice catch, though, I really should, erm, thank you for that." He directed this last part toward GIR. "So, thank you! But I still won't cooperate, because no one would've _had_ to catch me if I hadn't been kidnapped and thrown out a window!"

"C'mon, GIR, we're getting out of here!" Zim said, training his gaze on the window he had used as an entry and escape route to the human's room, ignoring the sphere's ramblings. It was only a matter of seconds before Dib realized the sphere was missing and, stupid as the human was, he'd put the missing robot and broken window together and figure out what had happened. The biomechanical legs erupted from Zim's PAK again and he plunged down the street, balanced on the appendages' four spindly tips. GIR ran after him, still gripping the sphere, and MiniMoose raced after them through the air.

"WHEEEE-HOOOO!" GIR cheered.

"How are you doing that?" the sphere spluttered at the sight of Zim's PAK legs. His voice hiccuped with every jolting step that GIR took. "Can _all_ humans do that? Then why didn't—wait, are those things coming out of your backpack? Where did you get _that?_ And where'd you get this robot, too, the one that caught me? What kind of robot _is _it, anyway, I mean—Oh, better question, better question, where are you taking me? Should've asked that earlier, as there are definitely one or two places I do _not_ want to go and if you're taking me to one of them than I should like to know about it beforehand and—Can you even hear me? Slow _down_, would you? No, seriously, could you- could you slow down? For a bit! Where are we _going?_"

They needed to run faster. Zim reached down, grabbed the single antennae sprouting from GIR's head, and hauled him up to strangled sounds of surprise from the captive sphere. Once he had hold of GIR, Zim put on a burst of speed and in less than a minute stumbled onto the walkway of his own house. The PAK legs snapped away again and he dropped GIR, ran forward, and nearly fell through his front door.

"Welcome home, Son!" the Roboparents chorused, peeking from their rooms and waving despite Zim having tried to program them not to do that countless times. MiniMoose zipped inside as well and GIR trotted in with the sphere. Zim slammed the door behind the four of them, locked and bolted it, and made sure to raise the security around the base to its highest settings.

"I'm gonna play with the roboball!" GIR annouced. Seeing as GIR's version of "playing" with something was usually another term for "breaking" it, Zim quickly took the robotic sphere out of GIR's hands and carried it to the elevator that opened under the end table by the wall.

The metal plates that made up the sphere's casing shifted as if it was contracting in on itself. "Really, I- I dunno what you think you're gonna do with me," it said. "You want me to hack something, I'm sure. I won't do it! So just… take me back, will you. Because I won't cooperate! No matter what! Oh. Unless… well, ah, there is the small matter of _torture_, isn't there. Always that avenue you could, um, go down, if you… so desired. But I will tell you, that that avenue, of TORTURE, is the- the avenue of DARKNESS. And EVIL. And there's no turning back from that, is there! Moral corruption, corruption of morals, all that, so, amazing suggestion here, how about you just y'know, not torture me! It's win-win! Win for me because I don't get tortured, win for you because you won't be on the Avenue of Darkness. Terrible place. Just. Terrible, really."

As the sphere ranted, Zim stepped out of the elevator into his base and dropped the robot none too gently on top of a nearby console. He wished he could have grabbed both spheres, but there just hadn't been time. He'd just have to settle for this one, examine it, and maybe take it apart to see what the humans might have installed in it.

"_There's someone at the door!_" a voice said suddenly, causing the sphere to shiver in fear.

Zim winced. He thought he had a pretty good idea of just who was paying him a visit.

* * *

Dib knew what had happened the second he opened his bedroom door and saw that Wheatley was missing. The little core had been stolen and spirited out the window, right under Dib's nose. He still didn't understand how that had happened. He was an extremely light sleeper.

But he _did_ know that Zim had been _inside_ _his house_ under cover of darkness. Who else would have broken in and taken a core? And why hadn't his dad's security system gone off? Man, that thing was useless.

Dib got dressed quickly, already out the front door before he had even put his boot on all the way. At last he wedged it all the way onto his foot and took off running down the street, not caring that it was the middle of the night. Wheatley and his captor (or maybe captors) were long gone, though Dib didn't need them to know exactly where Zim's house stood. His feet took him there nearly automatically.

When he reached the alien's front lawn he paused, heart thumping, staring apprehensively at the four humongous lawn gnomes standing guard on either side of the walkway. _To heck with it_. He jumped onto the walkway and sprinted to the door, hammering on it with his fist. None of the gnomes moved and Dib relaxed slightly; the security grid must still be broken.

After several moments the purple door cracked open to reveal Zim in his human disguise. "What do _you_ want, _Dib?_" he snapped.

Dib fixed him with a scowl. "My robot back."

"I have no idea what you're talking about. Good-bye, worm child," Zim said, closing the door again in Dib's face. His next yell was muffled and not directed to Dib. "GIR! Something's still wrong with the gnome field! What did you _do?_"

"Zim!" Dib raised his voice. "I'm not leaving without Wheatley! And I'm not going to forget that you broke into my house!"

"LIES! I did no such thing!" Zim shouted back. "Begone with you before I put my gnomes on your scent! They're deadly!"

"Your lawn gnomes are broken, Zim," Dib deadpanned.

Zim's stupid cackling could be heard right through the door. "Oh… sad, pathetic _Dib_. I think you'll find the lawn gnomes are perfectly all right and very much ALIVE!" The cackling broke into maniacal laughter. There was absolutely no change in the unmoving lawn gnomes and Zim's laughter faded away. "…GIR, I'm never leaving you in charge of the gnome controls again. _EVER_."

Dib sighed, leaning against the gross alien door. "Zim, just give me back the robot."

"No," Zim said.

"Yes."

"NO!"

"Give him back!"

"FINDERS KEEPERS!"

It was such an immature and unexpected thing to say that Dib stared at the door, unsure for a moment as to how to respond. "You didn't find him, you _stole_ him!"

"Finders keepers and losers weepers. Victory for ZIM!"

Dib smacked himself in the face. "Man, Zim, how old are you, _five?_ …Ow."

"I don't have to listen to you, Dibworm," Zim taunted from inside the house. "My gnome field may not be operational right now but you will still never manage to break into my fortress!"

Dib took in the strange, slanted purple-and-green building, with its odd assortment of gnomes, plastic flamingoes, puffer fish and 'I love Earth' signs on the lawn. "'Fortress?'"

"Yes. Now go away."

Dib gave one last futile pound on the door before backing up and scrutinizing the house from top to bottom. He should've known better than to come asking Zim for the core back. He'd have to go about this with the usual method—figuring out a way of breaking into the alien's underground base. And with the gnome field out of commission, what better time to do it?

Giving the house one last disparaging look, he turned and headed back toward his own home to gather supplies.


End file.
